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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2004, 352 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2005, 344 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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From the book jacket:
A stirring and vivid novel about a white boy
raised among natives on the harsh Alaskan
tundra, Ordinary Wolves depicts a life
different from what most people have ever
known.....Dispelling all mythical visions of
Alaska, this evocative novel leads readers down
its true trails, to feel the icy pinch of cold,
to hunker as blizzards moan overhead. And in the
twilit spaces from which animals appear are the
wolves - and Cutuk's father - living their lives
out on the tundra, unobtrusive, unapologetic,
uninvolved in the world beyond.
Comment: Ordinary Wolves
makes Jack London's Call of the Wild look
positively bland; Seth Kantner is the real
thing; whereas London wrote most of
his books about Alaska while living in
California, Seth Katner was born in a sod
igloo on the Alaskan tundra and raised simply on
the land––wearing mukluks before they were
fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and
communing with the native Eskimos of the region.
As Barbara Kingsolver writes, 'once in a
great while a novel comes along that can shiver
right down your bones and show you the world was
always larger than you knew. This is just such
an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid
and beautiful and honest as life, it sweeps back
the material curtain of human contrivance to
reveal what lies panting behind it. A piece of
your heart and some longing, I promise, will
stay on in that other place forever."
Ordinary Wolves deserves to become a classic;
don't miss this extraordinary book!'
This review
first ran in the August 17, 2005
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