Does it ever get good?

I made it to Chapter 10. An abusive, child-beating husband who allows his children to be horrible and disrespectful to his wife. And she tolerates it. I couldn't find a character to like, so not for me. Read the Indian Creek Chronicles if you want a good story.

10 people found this helpful

40 years of abuse

This woman lived with an abusive husband and abusive step children, cringeworthy tales of verbal and physical abuse. The abusive situations detract from an otherwise story of living in Alaska between the bush and covilization. Very sad.

5 people found this helpful

The account of a real life

Great job Dolly. Fascinating account of life in backwoods Alaska. Challenging in every way and yet your delight comes through as you describe decades of details.

3 people found this helpful

Good story but read with caution

I'll start by saying I enjoy books about survival in the wilderness and love hearing how people deal with situations differently. However let me WARN you, HARRY is not just an abusive husband and father but CRUEL. This story will make you mad at the amount of abuse Dolly endures not only from Harry but his 2 crazy daughters from a previous relationship. With that said this story is well written and I enjoyed reading of her adventures and those of her young son and daughter. It has its moments that will make you laugh and others where you cry for the loses she endures. We learn of a land dispute that she is currently having that will make you irate and want to do something to help her. Maybe someone reading this book will have an idea that can help her with her land issue. if you can get past her asshole husband and read the entire book, I feel like most folks will be cheering Dolly and her now grown daughter on and hope she is able to keep her homestead. I wanted to stop reading because the abuse really bothered me but I'm glad I kept going. She has 2 more books after this and I will read them. ..UPDATE...I have now read all 3 of her books and so glad I did. I couldn't stop reading them, I must say they may be the best books I've read about living in Alaska and I have read many. They also rank in my top 5 books about homesteading anywhere. I do hope she continues to write , she has a special gift with her style of writing.

2 people found this helpful

Stopped about 2 hours in.

Its written like a children's book. I was really looking forward to the story because the content is of great interest to me. Sadly though it's clear the author is not a writer by precession. What's worse is that it is also read like a 2nd grade teacher reading aloud to her classroom.

2 people found this helpful

BEST READ EVER!

I enjoyed every minute of this book. I felt like I was there. Thank you so much for this book. As an avid OffGrid person this book is as real as it gets. I could read this book all over again and still enjoy it.

1 person found this helpful

Getting through some chapters is hard but worth it

Hearing the verbal emotional and physical abuse Dolly's husband doled out was enough to make me so angry at Dolly for standing by such a man that I nearly returned the book.
I finished it though and am glad I did.
I hope her daughter writes a book. My heart aches for the children of Dolly''s husband's daughters by previous marriages. I wish we could find out where they are now and what happened to them

1 person found this helpful

Full of domestic abuse of wife & children

I normally love stories in such a setting, but it was a battle to even finish this one. To help understand this review; the homestead could only be reached by flight or by walking about a hundred miles

The author—the wife—was brutally abused. The children were abused and the mother did nothing to keep them safe. The abuse was both physical and verbal.
Examples: once the physical abuse was so bad that the kids thought the mom would die. By then the dad had run off back to town.
The father/husband regularly left the wife and children with no food other than what they could hunt/gather (in an area where fish were not an option) even when game was sparse while he went away to live in town. For years his time was mostly spent in town with the children and wives often going hungry for long periods. When he did show up he brought groceries for himself and wife was expected to cook two meals—one for him with the groceries he brought and one for herself and the kids with what they hunted, grew, or gathered. Not until the daughter was old enough to find work in town did the mother have groceries and only because she bought them and brought them to her mother n

Abuse was also verbal and emotional with the father frequently and regularly calling the daughters whores both to their face and to the mother.

The disabled son had such a horrible life that it was probably the cause or at least a contributor to his suicide.

Wife stays with Assholr abuser til death.

Lots of touches of bigotry, too. This wasn’t just limited to their problems with a Native owned corporation trying to steal their land. I can understand them being upset about this. But the bigotry against native people and other minorities is found through the whole book over and over again.

Total waste of money and I regret not returning it at the first instant of abuse.

The performance was also stilted with very odd inflections.

Very Interesting Read

I truly enjoyed this family's story of living off grid in the wilderness of Alaska. Their lives were full of hardship and obstacles they had to work through. I would highly recommend.

Glad they weren't my neighbors

Suffered through the entire book hoping that eventually there would be some insight as to why someone would want to homestead in Alaska and suffer through near tragedy after near tragedy. But one never learns this other than the desire to have some privacy.

So we have:

An abusive husband with no parenting skills and few if any redeeming qualities who rails against the government yet in the end turns to the government for help and then complains when things don't go smoothly.

An enabling spouse who is there for reasons we never really understand. maybe I missed it but why did she ever leave Wisconsin in the first place?

A one-sided story of the conflict over who owns the land. White folk come and steal the land from the natives and that's good. But when the natives in return try to steal the land back from the white folk that's bad. I would have loved to have heard the other side of the story as well.

And the recurrent not so subtle racism. Basically the natives get everything. If dad had married a native I'd have health insurance. The best one was when the woman from Iowa remarked about a woman of color up there as to how she made a living for herself and not relied on government handouts. Because we do know that people of color all rely on the government for handouts as opposed to white folk who all work hard for a living.

My interest in books like these are to gain some insight from these people as to why they do what they do but unfortunately those are far and few between.