One of my favorite reviews is in the People's World, (by the erudite activist Tim Wheeler. He captured at so many levels what I explored across the political, cultural, spiritual and romantic worlds - never forgetting the very land of the Far North, its wildlife).
It's an older review hence the mention of President George Bush Sr.
Excerpts:
"Alaskan landscape teems with life", by Tim Wheeler
Thomas grew up in Nome, Alaska, and uses her intimate knowledge to paint a vivid portrait of the arctic tundra and icy seas around the fictional village Itiak. Instead of being cold and bleak, her landscape teems with life, the people full of intelligence, humor and courage...
This story of star-crossed lovers probes the most burning issues of our day: the rights of women, especially women of color; war versus peace; magic versus science; oil company greed versus the traditional — and sustainable — society of the Alaska Native peoples. Kayuqtuk, the “Red Fox,” aka Gretchen, is an Athabascan orphan adopted by an Inupiaq family. During epileptic seizures she sees visions, and is convinced she is a shaman. She falls in love with ornithologist Leif Trygveson, who has come north in 1971 searching for a flock of endangered Tallin's geese. He is also fleeing the draft and the Vietnam War. He is of mixed Norwegian-Athabascan heritage. His father was a member of the Young Communist League so Trygveson is also a “red diaper baby.” Thomas herself is from a Norwegian-American, left-wing background. So once again her portrait of Leif has great verisimilitude.
Thomas has filled her canvas with many powerful portraits and infused her writing with a sense of foreboding. This novel reminded me of O.E. Rolvaag’s saga, “Giants in the Earth,” with its doomed Norwegian homesteader, Per Hansa.. I couldn’t put Thomas’ book down.
For me, the most heartrending character is Willy, a skilled hunter who is forced to trek further and further out onto the ice, hunting for seal. He, more than any other, personifies the dying out of a hunting culture based on unparalleled survival skills in the world’s most hostile habitat. He could conquer anything nature threw at him but could not survive the “invasion from the Lower Forty-Eight.” Willy is destroyed by alcohol but also by the encroachment of oil corporations, by military recruiters seeking to send him to Vietnam, and ultimately, by global warming that literally is melting the ground he stands on.
Given George W. Bush’s quest to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the looming threat to our biosphere from corporate profiteering, Thomas’s book could not be more timely."
