Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage-learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio-and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska, where she had leased a roadhouse in the tiny settlement of Taylor. Julia had no idea what to expect when she arrived, but to her surprise she found a healing power in the stark beauty of the vast tundra-the summer wildflowers and berries, the reindeer, foxes, and wolves. Later she reveled in the boisterous, chaotic boomtown atmosphere that prevailed when thousands of American troops descended on Nome at the outbreak of World War II.

A lyrical and affecting memoir of those years, Outside Passage is simultaneously an emotional account of a young girl's first steps into adulthood and a unique portrait of a vanished frontier life.

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Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage-learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio-and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska, where she had leased a roadhouse in the tiny settlement of Taylor. Julia had no idea what to expect when she arrived, but to her surprise she found a healing power in the stark beauty of the vast tundra-the summer wildflowers and berries, the reindeer, foxes, and wolves. Later she reveled in the boisterous, chaotic boomtown atmosphere that prevailed when thousands of American troops descended on Nome at the outbreak of World War II.

A lyrical and affecting memoir of those years, Outside Passage is simultaneously an emotional account of a young girl's first steps into adulthood and a unique portrait of a vanished frontier life.

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Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

by Julia Scully

Narrated by Celeste Lawson

Unabridged — 6 hours, 19 minutes

Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

by Julia Scully

Narrated by Celeste Lawson

Unabridged — 6 hours, 19 minutes

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Overview

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage-learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio-and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska, where she had leased a roadhouse in the tiny settlement of Taylor. Julia had no idea what to expect when she arrived, but to her surprise she found a healing power in the stark beauty of the vast tundra-the summer wildflowers and berries, the reindeer, foxes, and wolves. Later she reveled in the boisterous, chaotic boomtown atmosphere that prevailed when thousands of American troops descended on Nome at the outbreak of World War II.

A lyrical and affecting memoir of those years, Outside Passage is simultaneously an emotional account of a young girl's first steps into adulthood and a unique portrait of a vanished frontier life.


Editorial Reviews

Time Magazine

...[A] simple reminder of the immense power of a child's love, which can last through terrible neglect.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Irresistible... Told in a spare, luminous voice...the sense of place is sharp and clear as the Alaskan air itself...It's a rare delight to find a book in which the setting and voice so perfectly mesh.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

In this "plain but lovely" memoir, "the subdued rhetoric of directness has a grace equal to a more heightened rhetoric.
The New York Times Book Review

Magazine Staff Elle

In this stunning memoir, Julia Scully recounts her exotic childhood in Alaska. . . . That she gained such a richness of experience from such a cutoff place is one of the delights of this miraculous book.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.)

Journal of the West - Keith A. Sculle

"This reviewer values the book most for its novel contribution in the detailed ethnography of one roadhouse. . . . Nome, described at length in the author’s gifted prose capturing sites, sounds, smell, weather, the surrounding landscape and the feel of life, gains equal attention with the roadhouse. . . . [A]n unvarnished true story."

Time

A simple reminder of the immense power of a child’s love, which can last through terrible neglect.

Time

A simple reminder of the immense power of a child’s love, which can last through terrible neglect.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940169918502
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date: 09/01/2013
Edition description: Unabridged
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