Memoir by a woman who right out of high school fell in love with a man she met through an online dating site. They married but it didn’t work out. The breakup and eventual divorce devastated her. Looking for a new start, she moved to Alaska where she took a job living in someone’s cabin to care for his sled dogs during the winter. She learned to survive the rugged harsh conditions, and found a great love of the deeply cold, widely open landscape, and of mushing sled dogs. Decided to run in the Iditarod. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that far in her story. Not sure why. It’s the kind of book you’d think I’d love. Personally, I wasn’t that interested in her love life and breakup woes, but slogged through the first few chapters hoping it would get better when it was more about Alaska and living with the sled dogs. It did, but only marginally. Something about the prose, in spite of how much the landscape and nature filled her soul, left me feeling distracted, mind wandering everywhere else. Particularly the way she put words in the dogs’ mouths- literally, in conversational quotes like a person was talking in the room, but with odd spelling (think “lolcat” cute) it really threw me off. Every single time it came up. Which got more and more frequent. Sorry, couldn’t read this one.
Borrowed from the public library.
