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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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'I've not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful'.. Louise Erdrich.
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. In its pages, Cutuk, a boy equally uncomfortable in the ways of whites and Inupiaq, tells of his youth and young adulthood: of his father, who brought his family to Alaska from Chicago before Cutuk's birth; of his adopted Inupiaq family; and of the vast Arctic expanse beneath the frozen sky. It is here that Cutuk grows up - hunting, fishing, and living off the land, far away from the grinding, yet beckoning, machine of consumer culture. 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.
BookBrowse Note: The following Inupiaq words appear in this excerpt:
Chapter One
IN THE BAD MOUSE YEAR-- two years after magazines claimed a white man hoofed on the moon--Enuk Wolfglove materialized one day in front of our house in the blowing snow and twilight of no-sun winter. His dog team vanished and reappeared in the storm. Abe stood suddenly at the window like a bear catching a scent. "Travelers!" He squeezed out his half-smoked cigarette, flicked it to the workbench, wiped ashy fingers on his sealskin overpants. We kids eyed the cigarette's arc--we could smoke it later, behind the drifts, pretend we were artists like him.
"Poke up the fire?" Abe grinned like an older brother, our best friend, no dad at all. "And hide the vanilla." His head and broad shoulders disappeared as he ...
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...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Barbara Kingsolver
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. Howard Frank Mosher
Seth Kantner's novel, Ordinary Wolves, is a magnificent and dramatic evocation of what it truly means to be a human being on North America's last real frontier. Ordinary Wolves is an original and beautifully written novel by a fresh new voice in American fiction. Louise Erdrich
I've not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful.In the interview that you can read at BookBrowse, Seth Kantner says that Jack London's writing did influence him to become a writer; however he goes on to say that 'London said when you spat or pissed it crackled and froze before it hit the ground. It never did that when I was a kid––it got to 78 below one time and it never did that!'
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