(In this backwater, there’s only one boy around anyway.) But Dad would prefer that Leni jump out of bed in the middle of the night and clean her gun than socialize with anybody, ever. By the middle of the book, Leni is 17, and there is a boy - Tom Walker’s son, of course. Hannah manages to keep all this from getting too repetitive by steadily raising the stakes. Still, she wouldn’t get anywhere by going to the police as the book points out, 1974 was a time when a woman with a job couldn’t get a credit card without a man’s permission. Cora is covering for Ernt for emotional, not practical, reasons. Hannah presents a sickeningly codependent marriage in which Mama makes excuses for Dad’s violence and refuses to tell anyone what’s happening to her, no matter how bad it gets. And in a one-room log cabin, Leni can’t not see what’s going on. Now to the main event: Ernt goes from intimidating his wife and daughter to seriously beating Cora.

Walker’s big crime is that Cora finds him attractive. Ernt also starts hating Tom Walker, the local rich person, who has no discernible bad qualities and does his best to help the Allbrights. Then he starts bonding with Mad Earl (“folks call me Mad Earl”), the biggest paranoid white supremacist survivalist nut around, whom Ernt will soon best when it comes to crazy.

This setup suits Ernt for about five minutes. That’s because the tiny outpost near Homer, where the Allbrights homestead (in real life, Hannah’s family runs a travel lodge in the same general area) has citizens who help one another and show up to share the work. This is the kind of book in which the Alaskan cabin is a horrible mess until, practically overnight, it’s fresh and clean - not easy without running water. Ernt has been moving his family around ever since he got home, looking for some kind of happy new start. But he has been “weird since the war,” which is about as clinical as “The Great Alone” gets, and he is this book’s designated bad guy. When “The Great Alone” begins, in 1974, Leni is 13 and her father is still reasonably sane. The book’s main character, Leni Allbright, is the daughter of a beautiful hippie mother, Cora, and a father, Ernt, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The terrible troubles are completely one-note.

Instead, she came up with “The Great Alone,” an Alaskan family drama that bears almost no surface resemblance to “The Nightingale.” It’s a heart-tugger written in borderline young adult style, combining terrible troubles with notes of overripe romance. That was “The Nightingale” (2015), based on a true story and centered on two sisters caught up in the French Resistance, and it was such a hard act to follow that Hannah says she wrote and discarded a novel she could have published next. Kristin Hannah has written more than 20 novels, but it took one monster hit to really put her on the map.

The nightingale a novel book review