Rating: WARTY!
This is one of the most misguided, patronizing novels I've ever not read - which is to say I listened to it on audiobook, and DNF'd it two-thirds the way through because it was awful. The author consistently refers to the people as Eskimo, which some Alaskans do not mind, but it would have been much better to have actually made the characters a specific people. Eskimo is insulting because it blankets a variety of peoples like snow, classing them as all the same and employing a potentially insulting term to do so.
Bright Dawn is the main character. Black Star is her dog. Yes we get the English names, never the native language names - not for her or for anything in this entire story except this annoying and patronized stereotype of primitive superstition called Oleg.
The characters are shown raping and pillaging for a living - helping themselves to nature like they not only own it, but it's also an endless supply, and not even giving thanks for it. They're portrayed pretty much like this is all that all of them know. it's insulting, and the callous disregard for animals, including the dogs who get no reward when their human owners "win" the race - which the dogs have actually done. I can see working dogs being used in daily life, but to force them to run over a thousand miles at risk of injury and death for no reason other than human ego is pathetic.
There are moose attacks in the Iditarod. Moose are solitary and not 'bad tempered' - they're just very territorial and defensive. They're not human. They don't have human behaviors or motives. They're deer and they weight up to 1,800 pounds, not merely 700). The attack on Bright Dawn is ridiculous. That's when I quit reading it. The lack of respect for the natural world, and the portrayal of the dogs savaging the moose without a word of sorrow on its behalf was inexcusable. They were invading its territory, it was not invading theirs.
This story was about as pathetic as you can get, and while Jessica Almasy did a decent job reading it, the material was the problem here, not the reading.
