Two Old Women
Posted: 2020/04/08 Filed under: Book Reviews, E-Books, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2020, alaska, april, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, James Grant, Velma Wallis, women 1 CommentWallis, Velma. Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival. New York: Perennial, 1993.
Reason read: Seward Day is in March.
Two old women do not know each other very well before being abandoned by their People. Surviving the wilds of Arctic Circle Alaska is serious business, especially when you are elderly. Winter is closing in, food is scarce, and it is time for the tribe to be moving on. The Athabaskan Chief and his Council make the tough decision to leave their weakest behind in order to survive the harsh elements. This means seventy-five year old Sa’ and eighty year old Ch’idzigyaak are left to fend for themselves: finding food, making clothes, securing shelter, and staving off loneliness. These women are tough and resourceful, which makes for great perseverance.
Spoiler alert. This has a happy ending so you know the women survive. That wasn’t the plot twist for me. What I didn’t expect was the women’s fear of their tribe “finding” them again. They were suspicious of potential malevolent behavior (including cannibalism) if they were discovered to have survived. Even when they are reunited with their People, it takes time to trust them again. Who can blame them?
In my modern day society, I thought could not imagine a society where a community leaves its elderly behind, knowing full well they will probably will die. But then again, oh wait. I do. Italy, March 2020. They had to make the hard decision to not offer ventilators to anyone over the age of 80. Survival of the fittest.
Quote I liked best, “The body needs food but the mind needs people” (p 65).
Author fact: Wallis was born in the Alaskan interior. Two Old Women is her first novel.
Book trivia: Two Old Women was illustrated by James Grant.
Nancy said: Pearl actually didn’t chose Two Old Women. She asked author Dana Stabenow to select some Alaskan titles. Stabenow said Two Old Women is very controversial in Alaska.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “All Set For Alaska” (p 15).
White Sky, Black Ice
Posted: 2019/03/18 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, march, murder, mystery, police, series Leave a commentJones, Stan. White Sky, Black Ice. New York: Soho Press, 1999.
Reason read: Alaska’s Seward Day takes place in March.
The first book in Stan Jones’s Nathan Active series has the task of painting a picture of who Nathan Active is. The character development is slow in regards to Active’s personality. Jones spends a lot of time building the backstory of Active’s adoption after his fifteen year old Inupiat mother gave him up. He was raised by a white couple in Anchorage and grew up to be a state trooper. Here’s the rub: he has been posted back in his little birth village of Chukchi where he feels torn between the cultures of his upbringing and the traditions in his blood. He’s an obvious outsider, being raised in the big city. But when atypical suicides start happening one right after the other Active decides to listen to his ancestral roots and dig in.
Confessional: because White Sky, Black Ice takes an environmental spin I kept thinking of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. She also tackles the theory that our planet is going to hell.
Author fact: Stan Jones launched the Kotzubue newspaper. He was also an editor for a couple of other newspapers.
Book trivia: White Sky, Black Ice is the first in the Nathan Active series.
Nancy said: Pear said nothing specific except to say White Sky, Black Ice is the first in a series.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the interesting chapter “All Set For Alaska” (p 14).
Fine and Bitter Snow
Posted: 2019/02/14 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust i, book review, Dana Stabenow, february, Fiction, murder, mystery, series Leave a commentStabenow, Dana. A fine and Bitter Snow. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2002.
Reason read: to continue the sequel started in January in honor of the month Alaska became a state.
Kate is back. It’s been awhile since we last caught up with the feisty private investigating crime solver. In A Cold-Blooded Business she and single dad, Jack, were hot and heavy. Now several books later Jack is dead and Kate is sort of looking after his son from a previous marriage. As an FYI – Kate’s grandmother has also passed. In time, this detail will become important to the plot. For now, Kate needs a distraction from the grief these dual deaths have caused and, oddly enough, it comes in the form of oil drilling in southeast Alaska. Drilling in general has been a sensitive subject to all involved but when longtime friend and park ranger, Dan O’Brien, is deemed too environmentally friendly and is forced into early retirement, it becomes Kate’s mission to save his job. It becomes even more personal when a good friend of her grandmother’s is found murdered just days after agreeing to help Dan keep his job. Is the drilling in the wildlife preserve connected to this most recent death? State trooper, Jim Chopin, is on the case and he asks Kate to help…in more ways than one.
Confessional – I that this was the perfect pairing with Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior which is also an environmental drama.
Like I liked, “The moose might kick your ass and the grizzly might rip it off and the wolf might eat it, but they wouldn’t talk you to deal while they got on with the job” (p 232). This is Dana’s way of saying yeah, I know the woman is holding shotgun to Kate’s face and talking way too much, but I need to explain some motives here before she pulls the trigger.
Author fact: Stabenow also writes science fiction.
Book trivia: A Fine and Bitter Snow is Stabenow’s twelfth story.
Nancy said: nothing specific about A Fine and Bitter Snow.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter “I Love a Mystery” (p 117).
Cold-Blooded Business
Posted: 2019/01/24 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, E-Books, Fiction | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust i, book review, Dana Stabenow, Fiction, january, murder, mystery, series Leave a commentStabenow, Dana. A Cold-Blooded Business. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1994.
Reason read: Alaska became a state in January.
Disclaimer: A Cold-Blooded Business is part of a series and since this is my first Kate Shugak mystery I feel like I jumped into it blind.
Kate Shugak is a private investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney’s office. In A Cold-Blooded Business her assignment is to go undercover at RPetCo, short for Royal Petroleum Company based in Prudhoe Bay up in the Arctic Circle. John King, CEO of RPetCo wants to know who has been dealing cocaine to his employees on company time. His main concern is overdoses are on the rise. There has even been a death by drowning linked to drug use. “Get that dope off my slope” he urges poetically.
Small pet peeve. Teeny tiny, really. On page 142 Kate is yearning for peace and quiet since her boyfriend’s young son, Johnny, “had the television on from the time he woke up till the time he went to bed.” However, not even eleven pages later Kate’s exposure to television is described as limited to Bernie’s television at the Roadhouse “eternally tuned into a basketball game” or Bobby’s set which existed “solely to be hooked up to a VCR” (p 152 – 153). I probably wouldn’t have squawked if the contradictory details weren’t so close together.
As an aside, what irked me from the beginning is that Kate is supposed to go undercover as a roustabout on the slope but within her first week on the job she meets a former medic/acquaintance from another job and a trooper who knows her name. She has to lie and say she’s no longer an investigator. Later she rushes to the first overdose on the job. Bursting into the room she encounters the victim is her cousin and he’s just as surprised to see her as she is him. Finally, Cindy Sovaluk, a woman she meets in the sauna turns out to know her grandmother. So much for undercover when four different people know your name or are related to you!
As another aside, are yearling bears really harmless enough to tug on their tails?
Author fact: Stabenow lives in Alaska and definitely knows the culture. That’s the obvious. What isn’t as obvious is just how many books Ms Stabenow has written. Check out her website here.
Book trivia: A Cold-Blooded Business is part of a series. I counted nineteen Shugak mysteries and I’m only reading two.
Nancy said: Pearl said Cold-Blooded Business is “her favorite Shugak mystery” (Book Lust p 18).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the unimaginative chapter called “Alaska” (p 17). I would have riffed off a Phish tune and called it “Alaska? I’ll Ask Her”.
