First-Year Reading Experience – 2006
The University of Montana—Missoula is pleased to announce that Ordinary Wolves, by Seth Kantner, is the title selected for the 2006 First-Year Reading Experience.
Watch this site for announcements of events and activities for Fall 2006!
About
the Book The opening paragraph of Seth Kantner’s Ordinary Wolves sets the place and time of this unique novel.
“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 a 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.”
Cutuk Hawcly lives with his father, brother and sister a day’s sled-drive away from an Inupiaq village in Alaska, which provides their connection to the outside world. The extreme conditions in which they live have driven their mother away. Their experiences are a culture apart from even those who have experienced the wilderness. Wolves, moose, and raven are an inextricable part of this family’s landscape where survival is quite singular and a part of everyday.
Contemporary Authors Online provides the following book review:
In Ordinary Wolves artist Abe Hawley came to Alaska to find his bush-pilot father, fell in love with the wilderness, and stayed. His wife could not bear the isolation and hardship, however, and left him to raise their three children alone. The youngest child, who is known by his Inupiaq name, Cutuk, watches his brother, Jerry, leave for Fairbanks, and his sister, Iris, go off to college in Anchorage to become a teacher. Cutuk, who has never found his place in either the native or white cultures, becomes curious about life away from the tundra and travels to Anchorage, where he is overcome with sensory overload. He eventually returns to Takunak and Dawna, the young woman he has loved since childhood, and who may become his future companion.
Library Journal reviewer Jim Coan felt that the novel's "real depth" is found in the scenes in which Cutak is alone, hunting, stalking wolves, driving a dog team, and negotiating an environment "that, while harsh, is nevertheless in many ways more amenable than contemporary urban America." Booklist contributor Donna Seaman called Kantner an "impressively fluent and probing first-time novelist."
--Sue Samson, Humanities Librarian
Contact the First-Year Experience Committee
Previous First Year Reading Experience sites: 2004 | 2005
Webpages: Samantha Hines, Social Sciences and Outreach Librarian
Last updated: 30 May 2006