Customer Reviews

In a Different Light: Growing Up in a Yupik Eskimo Village in Alaska

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book for my oldest to read so she could learn a little about Alaska. I am currently working on my teaching degree and hope to teach out in the bush of Alaska and thought this would help my daughter learn a little about the culture. I have read some reviews that says the author mixes in fiction with the non-fiction in the book, but honestly my daughter doesn't care, and I don't even know if she noticed it. She has been thoroughly immersed in the book and that is all that matters. So based on that alone I am giving this book high ratings..

Read On!!

This book is written for adolescents or (very) young adults. It describes Yup'ik village life in the 1990s from the point of view of an eighth grader. The approach taken by the author to personalize the details of daily life may be more interesting to a young person than a standard geography reference book. Nevertheless, one wonders how accurate the descriptions really are, and especially whether young Yup'iks would really look at their own world the way this outsider imagines. In that sense, this book is certainly a work of Western fiction. One amusing facet of the book is several pictures that are supposed to illustrate modern Yup'ik life; however, the children's shoes are clearly from the 1970s. Either Yup'iks are just now starting to wear 1970s shoes, or the author has not updated her pictures from her earlier visit to Alaska. Also, a picture from the chapter that supposedly takes place in February shows a child walking outdoors in a sweater without a hat or boots. Is this possible in the southwest coast of Alaska? The language of the book was quite simple (did it have to be THIS simple?) and most of the topics would be suitable for middle school children.