Away by Amy Bloom

Fine Print: I read this a couple months ago but am moving across town so I decided to write the blog before I gave the book to Title Wave.

What I’m reading now: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (better than all the hype)

Blog update: While I like to think that I publish these things on the whole in relative obscurity it seems more people are randomly finding Alaska Book Report (thanks for the books, Epicenter Press), which is good but also hard because it means I actually have to pay attention to posting things.

Amy Bloom’s Away isn’t so much a book about Alaska as a literary novel about a journey that takes a woman into Alaska. It is about survival and it is about a mother’s love and it is told very well.

At a book reading at Title Wave several months ago, Amy Bloom the author displayed all the qualities that remind me why I’m glad I’m living in Alaska and not on the East Coast with high heels and sophistication and impatience. Almost as if we should apologize for not reading her short stories or the New Yorker often enough, but as she spoke she became just another person that has molded her personality to her environment (or chosen an environment that suits her personality) and when she read a section about the protagonist’s experience on the Telegraph Trail encountering a cabin with children, the author’s personality melted and gave away for the story, a feat which still amazes me as possible since authors put so much of themselves into books.

The story begins in New York but the New York of 1924 and Lillian, the main character, is only days away from eating her own dress out of hunger not in a Manhattan apartment sipping martinis.

The book is so vivid and rich at times that it is strange thinking about Bloom inventing it. When I could, I would put her out of my mind entirely and just focus on the story and words, which was easy enough done because the book is quite absorbing. The Alaska she describes is one I do and do not know and at times the story lessens on her arrival but worth it nonetheless.