Nutaaq and her older sister, Aaluk, are on a great journey, sailing from a small island off the coast of Alaska to the annual trade fair. There, a handsome young Siberian wearing a string of cobalt blue beads watches Aaluk “the way a wolf watches a caribou, never resting.” Soon his actions—and other events more horrible than Nutaaq could ever imagine—threaten to shatter her I~nupiaq world. Seventy years later, Nutaaq’s greatgranddaughter, Blessing, is on her own journey, running from the wreckage of her life in Anchorage to live in a remote Arctic village with a grandmother she barely remembers. In her new home, unfriendly girls whisper in a language she can’t understand, and Blessing feels like an outsider among her own people. Until she finds a cobalt blue bead—Nutaaq’s bead—in her grandmother’s sewing tin. The events this discovery triggers reveal the power of family and heritage to heal, despite seemingly insurmountable odds. Two distinct teenage voices pull readers into the native world of northern Alaska in this beautifully crafted and compelling debut novel.
I live far far away in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost community on the North American Continent--the top of the world, actually.
I've lived here pretty much all of my adult life and this place and its people, the Inupiaq Eskimos of Alaska, have shaped who I am as a writer. Most of the stories I write are set within this cultural context. It is not the culture I was not born into but it is the one I belong to, the one that has become home to me as a human being and as an artist.
Visit my website at www.debbydahledwardson.com and my blog: http://wordsfromthetop.blogspot.com.
