Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Silver Falls Library | 979.8 SCULLY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 979.804092 SCULLY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | 921 Scully, Julia | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Alaska, in its way, demands your full attention. Like a slap in the face, the assault of the weather, the landscape, the sheer physical effort of enduring forces memories further and further away." In Outside Passage Julia Scully regathers the memories of her childhood, and, like the strange territory and time they cover--the isolated far western Alaskan frontier before and during World War II--these memories demand our full attention. They begin with her immigrant parents' efforts to make a living during the Depression in California and the Pacific Northwest. Faced with illness and despair, Julia's father commits suicide when she is seven, and she and her older sister, Lillian, discover his body. Julia's mother then leaves her daughters in a San Francisco orphanage and goes to Alaska, searching for an economic toehold at the edge of the continent. Julia seeks comfort in the rituals of the orphanage--learning how to knit and darn, roller-skating outside after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio. Trying to adapt, she submerges her memories: "It's not that I can't remember my mother or what it was like before . . . but I don't think about any of it because, when I do, my chest aches." Eventually, her mother buys a roadhouse--the only public place in Taylor, Alaska, it serves the settlement's small-time gold miners--and at last sends for her daughters to rejoin her. Despite the cold and isolation of Alaska, there are small blessings for Julia to count: secretive summer wildflowers and berries on the seemingly barren landscape, and the wild animals--reindeer, fox, and wolves--that roam the endless tundra. The young Julia serves whiskey to the rough customers who play poker at the ramshackle roadhouse, pans gold with a beguiling prospector, kisses her first boyfriend--one of the soldiers ordered to Alaska to defend against a possible Japanese invasion. As she begins to understand the mysteries of sexuality and her parents' secrets, she also begins to build the privations and the minor pleasures and the perceptions of her childhood into a platform for a wider and fuller life. In the same way, she has transformed her memories of that childhood into a written record sometimes as painful but always as beautiful as the cold, clear streams under which the gold lay hidden.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When the author was 11, she and her 13-year-old sister, Lillian, left San Francisco's Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they had spent the previous two years, to join their mother, Rose, who had opened a road house in the mining town of Taylor Creek, Alaska. In beautifully written, understated prose, Scully, a former editor of Modern Photography, describes an unusual domestic life in the early 1940s peopled with poker players, reindeer herders and her mother's married lover, set against the landscape of the tundra. The author describes vividly her mother's determined spirit that could not be crushed either by the suicide of her husband, whose body was discovered by the children, or the difficulties of caring for Julia and Lillian during harsh economic times. Through the distorted prism of time, Scully also remembers and struggles to understand what she and her sister felt, and denied feeling, about their anguished time in the orphanage. A perceptive and sensitive account. Author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An anecdotal and generally unreflective coming-of-age account set mainly in the Alaskan frontier. A former editor of Modern Photography, Scully endured an impoverished childhood: She and her older sister were placed in children's homes in San Francisco and later Seattle while their mother, Rose, a Jewish immigrant from Europe, struggled to make a go of it on the remote Seward Peninsula in and about Nome, working as a cook in a gold-mining camp, operating a roadhouse, and finding work in the home and shop of a Jewish merchant. Julia and her sister, Lillian, later followed their mother, living isolated but seemingly happy lives. Seasonal migrants, the family would shelter in Nome; it is here that Rose set up a housekeeping arrangement with Hessel, a liquor-store owner with a wife in San Franciso, who Scully claims ensured their isolation from the community and led Rose to seek an abortion, a fact gleaned by Scully years later. Nome, at the beginning of the war, when Scully was 12, bustled with sailors and marines, and in a town with few available women, young Julia has an eventful teenagehood. Soon after the war, she makes a break with the family and leaves to attend college. Scully's portraits of the gold miners, Eskimos, and sailors are warm and amusing, but throughout most of this short book, the depictions of Rose and Lillian are emotionally detached; Scully is unable, maybe due to her youth at the time and the subsequent span of years, to create an interior life for either member of her family, and her own emotions and concerns remain unrevealed, save for a sudden gush of self-awareness in the final chapters. This chronology of a hard and unusual childhood offers a good snapshot of the straggles of a Depression-era family in one of the more remote outposts in America, but it lacks the dramatic impact that these circumstances conferred upon the three women. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Will this be the Angela's Ashes of Alaska? With a large first printing and author appearances scheduled for New York and the West Coast, Random House is clearly banking on Scully's spare, difficult memoir hitting the same nerve that Frank McCourt's autobiographical phenomenon did. Despite its title, the book is not exactly about Alaska, for more than half the action takes place in California and Seattle. It is really about a family's struggle to survive--terrain explored more emotionally by Natalie Kusz in Road Song (1990), which is mostly set in Alaska. But Alaska--Nome, in particular--is central to Scully's story. Her father lived there, lost the family fortune there, and killed himself because of that loss. Her mother put Scully and her sister in an orphanage, while she retreated northwards to get back on her feet, financially and psychologically. In short, bleak chapters, Scully relates the vicissitudes of life as a child in a California orphanage and then as a teenager in wartime Alaska. A memorable expression of a difficult life. --Patricia Monaghan