JULIE OF THE WOLVES

I chose this book for book club and was relieved to discover that it’s still good after all this time. I loved it as a kid, not quite with the same intensity as Island of the Blue Dolphins (I didn’t own a copy of it, so there was less obsessive rereading), but in the same general manner, with admiration for its protagonist’s genius for lonely survival in extreme wilderness (eating regurgitated caribou meat from the mouth of a wolf, for instance), jealousy for her close kinship with animals (let’s face it, getting accepted into a wolf pack totally one-ups having a pet sea otter), and the fetishized grief that only preteen girls can feel at the sad parts (oh, and they are still sad, twenty years later). Jean Craighead George’s Eskimo heroine, Miyax/Julie, is just as hardcore but a bit less stoic than Scott O’Dell’s Karana, allowing for more focus on her emotional journey; she braves the elements not because she’s forced to, but because she’s caught between cultures, trying to navigate the shift between the traditions of her people (Miyax was raised in a remote seal camp, living in a manner you get the feeling was already old-fashioned even at that time) and the white-influenced modern world of plastic parkas and hunting by plane. When I was younger, the most tragic part of the story seemed to be the death that occurs (if you’ve read the book, you know what part I’m talking about), and while I still shed tears at that point, now it seems to me that the true sadness lies in Miyax being forced to accept that the life she yearns for is impossible; “the hour of the wolf and the Eskimo is over” (just as the real heartbreak of Island of the Blue Dolphins is knowing what happened to Karana once she left the island). Miyax must come to terms with the world as it exists, not as it should be, which is the kind of message that only increases in poignancy for adult readers.

I was shocked to discover that George wrote two sequels to Julie of the Wolves, Julie and Julie’s Wolf Pack, until I realized they were published more than two decades after the first installment, in the 1990s, when I wouldn’t have been looking for them. I’ll definitely be checking them out now.