Julie is so traumatized by the assault that she gathers clothes and tools and flees, thinking to walk across the tundra for a week to a ferry point and ultimately, live with her pen-pal in wondrous-sounding San Francisco. He fails, but threatens to try again the next day. Provoked by taunts that he ‘can’t mate her’, one day he angrily attempts to consummate the marriage. It becomes clear that the father-in-law is alcoholic, engages in bouts of wife battery, and that Daniel may be a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. The family shows up to claim her as their daughter-in-law, assuring Julie that Daniel (whose age is never revealed) will be ‘like a brother’. The father eventually fails to return after a hunting trip and is presumed dead. In a loving attempt to provide protection, Julie’s father makes an agreement with an old friend that Julie can come live with that family as the son’s bride when she is 13 in case anything ever happens to him and she finds her aunt unbearable. The ill-tempered great aunt who forced Julie’s father to allow her to move to town at age 9 isn’t motivated by Julie’s best interests, but by her own wish to have a live-in assistant as she ages. It is a difficult question, for herself as well as her people, and contributes to the crisis that sends her fleeing into the wilderness. Is she Julie, the girl forced by government school regulations to move to a far-away town, who learns English, and discovers the wonders of modern life? Or is she Miyax, the girl raised by her father in traditional ways after her mother’s early death, learning about land, animals, and self-sufficience? And it is through these efforts to keep spirits up that the author weaves in a deeper theme: the duality that shapes all aspects of the heroine’s life. Survival isn’t just a physical challenge, but a mental and emotional one as well the heroine knows that singing to herself, inventing rhymes and dances, reliving happy memories, and imagining her future life are just as important as creating shelter and locating edible plants. The author is in no hurry to answer, with the full background sprinkled a paragraph at a time throughout the story in between descriptions of current efforts to stay alive in a landscape moving from autumn to arctic winter. As opening hooks go, the question of how someone so young got into such a predicament is powerful. The story begins with a 13-year-old girl alone in the Alaskan wilderness, desperately yet systematically trying to establish communication with a wolf pack as her last means of avoiding starvation. Hopefully this isn’t too big a violation of review procedure considering the book is over a quarter century old). (Warning: Some spoilerish comments included, because they refer to the story’s banned status. Publication Info: HarperTrophy May 24, 2005
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