Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

Josie and her husband have split up, she's been sued by a former patient and lost her dental practice, and she's grieving the death of a young man senselessly killed. When her ex asks to take the children to meet his new fiancée's family, Josie makes a run for it, figuring Alaska is about as far as she can get without a passport. Josie and her kids, Paul and Ana, rent a rattling old RV named the Chateau, and at first their trip feels like a vacation: They see bears and bison, they eat hot dogs cooked on a bonfire, and they spend nights parked along icy cold rivers in dark forests. But as they drive, pushed north by the ubiquitous wildfires, Josie is chased by enemies both real and imagined, past mistakes pursuing her tiny family, even to the very edge of civilization.

5 stars for writing, 3 for the story which just makes no sense. Worth reading for the writing alone though.

THE GIFT OF COURAGE

This, I'm embarrassed to say, was my first exposure to Dave Eggers. The first hundred pages didn't win me over, but his writing — sentence by sentence — is clear, poignant and insightful, so I stuck with it and, by the end, I was a convert. Eggers takes his time and does a lot of meandering by way of looping flashbacks, but inexorably the narrative momentum builds to a glorious, overblown climax of near biblical proportions. You want to scream “preposterous,” and you'd have a perfect right to, but you're having a great time so you ride it out with him.

“Heroes” makes use of a classic “road picture” plot. Josie, the protagonist, is “on a journey to find herself” and the fact that she, with her young daughter and son in tow, are on a physical journey-to-nowhere is about as trite as you can get. But as they say, “clichés are clichés for a reason, because they work,” at least they do in the hands of skilled practitioners.

Josie's a hot mess — a runaway from an absurd marriage and a dental practice that clearly meant nothing to her. She spends endless hours beating herself up and self-questioning while her kids learn to fend for themselves. She berates herself for bad parenting, herself a product of a neglectful upbringing. But in their last ditch trek into the Alaskan wilderness, burning bridges as they go, Josie comes to realize the one thing she can impart to her children is just that — how to fend for themselves and learn to be courageous. In the end, isn't that what parenting is about? Teaching your kids to survive on their own? I had never thought of courage as a gift my parents gave me, and this book brought that fact to light. So for that and much more, thanks Mr. Eggers.