Outside Passage: A Memoir Of An Alaskan Childhood

Outside Passage is notable as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. As this memoir opens, 11-year-old Julia Scully and her 13-year-old sister, Lillian, arrive alone in Nome, Alaska, circa 1940--a town notable for its barren extremes. Then, with the force of a jump cut, Scully rushes us further back in time and place. In San Francisco, four years earlier, on a brilliant October day, she discovers her father's dead body in their dark apartment. The instant is forever imprinted on her mind, yet the ever-reticent narrator leaves us to imagine the scene and her reaction. "I don't know what happened next or even if I saw my father there on the kitchen floor. I just remember my sister and me running ... back to the coffee shop, back to my mother, who didn't need to ask what we had found."