Awards
Winner of the 2004 Milkweed National Fiction Prize
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"A man's novel full of nature lore and the mechanics of hunting and surviving, but also richly poetic and emotionally engrossing." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[A] magnificently realized story about a boy's coming-of-age in a difficult, distant place....[S]mart and authentic." Mark Kamine, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
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.