Outside Passage: a Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

In my review of Welfare Brat I remarked how impressive it is when people can remember so many details of their childhood. Scully, unfortunately, doesn't have quite the mastery that Childers does, but she reports that her sister has no memory of their childhood whatsoever, so I guess she's not doing too badly. The quality is a little uneven; some of the short, poetic chapters (64 of them in a 219 page book) are far more compelling than others.

The most interesting part to me was her time in a San Francisco Jewish orphanage in the late 1930s after her father died. (Her single, immigrant mother had gone on to Alaska to get them established.) Even though I didn't love it, as with most memoirs, I was really wishing for an epilog. I just hate not knowing what happens after she leaves Nome, never to think of it as home again. Other things—this is another present tense memoir. What's up with that? Also the historical details about the lives of (non-observant) Jews in 1940s at the treeline in Alaska are cool, but I wanted more.