Recommended Age:
12
+
Best for mature independent readers who enjoy immersive survival stories grounded in cultural identity and the natural world.
About the Book
Thirteen-year-old Miyax, an Inupiat girl, becomes lost on the Alaskan tundra while fleeing an arranged marriage and survives by befriending and learning from a pack of wolves. As she navigates survival in the wilderness, she must also reckon with the tension between her traditional Inupiat identity and the pressures of modern American culture. A Newbery Medal winner that is both a survival story and a meditation on cultural identity.
Content Ratings
💡
Moderate Themes
Miyax is processing the trauma of forced marriage and assault, the loss of her father, cultural dislocation, and the destruction of traditional ways of life; themes of survival, identity, and the cost of modernity are sustained throughout.
⚔️
Moderate Violence
Miyax's husband attempts to sexually assault her, which is depicted with restraint but is traumatic; wolves are hunted from planes; survival in the wilderness involves real danger; violence is significant but not gratuitous.
Engagement:
Genre:
Adventure
Published:
1972
Page Count:
170
