Review – This Much Country by Kristin Knight Pace (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Autobiography
Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1538762400
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: ARC through Amazon Vine
Rating: 4/5 stars
“In 2009, after a crippling divorce that left her heartbroken and directionless, Kristin decided to accept an offer to live at a friend’s cabin outside of Denali National Park in Alaska for a few months. In exchange for housing, she would take care of her friend’s eight sled dogs.
That winter, she learned that she was tougher than she ever knew. She learned how to survive in one of the most remote places on earth and she learned she was strong enough to be alone. She fell in love twice: first with running sled dogs, and then with Andy, a gentle man who had himself moved to Alaska to heal a broken heart.
Kristin and Andy married and started a sled dog kennel. While this work was enormously satisfying, Kristin became determined to complete the Iditarod — the 1,000-mile dogsled race from Anchorage, in south central Alaska, to Nome on the western Bering Sea coast.”
I picked this up to review because the premise sounded really interesting. This was well done and in general I really enjoyed it. I would recommend to anyone who is interested in survival, Alaska, or dog sledding.
Kristin makes some dicey decisions as a young woman and ends up in a bad marriage and a bad situation. She takes a job up in Alaska taking care of a guy’s cabin and his sled dogs as kind of a reset to her life. Up in Alaska she finds a new love (running sled dogs) and a new man to share her life with as well. This leads to her racing in both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod.
I enjoyed a lot of the survival aspects to this story and learning about dog sledding. Living in MN we get to the very cold temperatures discussed here and the idea of living in a place with those temperatures for extended periods of time without the support of a modern infrastructure is really intriguing.
For the most part I enjoyed this. It was a quick read that was easy to stay engaged in. I do have a couple small complaints. The first is that I could have done without the baby-like doggie-talk throughout; this didn’t fit with the story and felt awkward. The second is that I wish more time has been spent talking about survival in central Alaska and on the races themselves. We hear a lot about things leading up to the race but very little about what happens during the race itself.
Overall this was a good read and I enjoyed it. If you are interested in dog sledding or cold weather survival or in Alaska in general I would definitely recommend.
