To be honest, I haven’t read or watched much of anything about Alaska in a long long time. After working in a bookstore in Fairbanks (the farthest north independent bookstore in the country), and seeing what was being published about Alaska (don’t even ask me what I think about Jon Krakauer), there didn’t seem to be much of a point. I was nearly always disappointed and sometimes even angry. I don’t know everything about Alaska -- not by a long shot -- but I know enough and it has been clear to me for awhile that most authors writing about the state know next to nothing at all. And then I read Ordinary Wolves.

Author Seth Kantner has spent his entire life immersed in what is truly a uniquely Alaskan lifestyle. After years spent reading books that did not portray the Alaska he knew, he decided it was time to write his own. The decision to make his story fiction was easy – as he explained to me when we met recently, “it freed me from a lot of research and allowed me to write what I know.” What Kantner knows, better than most, is what it is like to live in a very remote place on the Earth, and not only survive there, but thrive. What he explores in his book however, is the tradeoffs that anyone must make when they choose such a distant life.