Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness

Okay, I'm going to try to avoid having an "A Few Good Men" moment here, but I LOVED this book.

When I was in high school I wrote a review of "A Few Good Men" for the newspaper and you wouldn't believe how much I waxed poetic about that movie. I
went off about how good it was. I went so far as to call it the perfect movie. When I got the graded review back from my Journalism teacher she wrote, "Kind of gushy." I was taken aback. People always like a bad review more than a good one, but I remember thinking to myself, "Gushing? Is it gushing to call the pyramids in Giza magnificent?" At that moment "A Few Good Men" was the film equivalent of the pyramids to me.

Later on, I remember reading a review in People that was favorable, but also rational. It had a great line in it that I still remember: "Jack Nicholson comes awfully close to doing a Jack Nicholson impression." It also said that Demi Moore's performance was so hammed up it could have been put between two pieces of rye bread and sold at a deli. I had to admit that the reviewer was right, and I started to feel a little stupid about my review.

Sidebar [But dude, that is a good movie -- even the minor characters -- Kiefer Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Noah Wyle? Don't get me started!]

I will try to refrain myself, because I feel like gushing about this book. I just loved it. It maybe seems more powerful to me because I didn't expect to like it as well as I did, and the subject matter is not the kind of thing I'd think I'd be into. Lest I get ahead of myself, let's start with the basics:

Some Stats:

Most important stat: It's a true story!
Year book was written: 1976
Year story takes place: 1927
Number of pages: 361
Time that I stayed up last night finishing book: 2:00 AM
Number of times I laughed out loud: 12+
Number of times I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next: 3
Number of times I read Tisha while working out on the treadmill: 1
Number of times YOU should read Tisha: 1+

Plot Summary

So, all morning long I've been looking up more info about this book so that my devoted readers would have the background they've come to expect from this blog. "Tisha" is so named because it is how the Indians/Eskimos pronounced "teacher." Her name is Anne Hobbes. In 1927 she left the civilized town she was teaching in Oregon to move to Chicken freaking Alaska to teach school for a year. The story was "told to" the author, Robert Specht, although Anne Hobbes is also attributed as having written it if you look her up. She considers herself to have written the book. I'm not implying any issues between her and Robert, just saying that it was a joint effort.

This book is very well written. From the first few pages I was stricken by how lean and entirely unaffected the writing is.

It's written in the first person and it starts out with Anne talking about the four day ride on horseback from Eagle, Alaska to Chicken. Not having ridden a horse since she was eleven, the trip was brutally painful for her, yet kind of funny. You can't help but like Anne because she is so down to earth and free from vanity.

The thought of a 19-year old girl making the decision to leave a very nice job teaching in Oregon to go to a settlement so remote that it's a four day horseride from Eagle is pretty astonishing. I can't even imagine the courage that must have taken and there were a lot of women who did it.

I kind of expected a quaint little Polyanna-type story of the village and its inhabitants but it turns out to be about how mostly everyone is an asshole. Anne is extremely liberated for the time and has no prejudice against Indians. This does not sit well with the Chicken crowd -- some of whom Toby Keith may have descended from.

In the year that Anne spends in Chicken she contends with cold that makes me, a native Minnesotan, feel like a complete wuss. There are stretches where it is 57 degrees below zero for weeks at a time. There are holes in her wall, there is no plumbing or electricity and people actually get stuck on the outhouse hole. She sleeps with her potatoes so that they won't freeze.

When she allows "breeds" -- half Indians into her classroom the "school board" -- which for some reason consists of three of the most shit-kickingly ignorant people in town -- throw a fit. When she falls for a half-Indian boy it gets even uglier. Things progress until Anne finds herself caught up in an adventure that is so dangerous and suspenseful that I couldn't go to sleep last night.

Despite the fact that Anne runs into a lot of prejudice, she manages to get along with people fairly well through most of the story. The details and descriptions of the way things were and how she felt are very genuine -- Specht didn't try to sex anything up. There are some beautiful descriptions of how Alaska looked in the dead of winter. Anne wasn't the least bit afraid of going out in the middle of nowhere on skis in weather that can only be described as complete bullshit.

There is no way you can walk away from this book and not be thoroughly impressed with this girl...I think I might be gay for her.

Here are a couple of my favorite parts.

In this scene Nancy, a no-nonsense older girl who is living with Anne and helping her out with the class, gets into it with Evelyn, the daughter of the biggest asshole in town. Evelyn has inherited his racist ways and is picking on an Indian kid. Where Anne is never really able to do anything about the snot-nosed brats in the class, Nancy is under no obligation to be cool.

"They must have washed Chuck's face with snow because it was all red and wet. None of them saw me, so I figured I'd let Nancy handle it. She was toughter than all of them put together.

'You keep your hands off this kid from here on,' Nancy said to Evelyn, putting a mitten on Chuck's shoulder.

'You don't have any right to tell us what to do,' Evelyn sneered.

'I'm not tellin' you what to do. I'm just tellin' you that if you lay your hands on this kid again I'm gonna bash your head in.'

They left Chuck alone from then on.

Sweet.

I think this is a really interesting passage because it never occurred to me that anyone would LIKE winter...

"Now I realized what the North was really like. It was made for winter because winter was when everything went on. You could ski any place you wanted to and get there twice as fast and twice as easily as you could before there was snow. People went out and brought in the trees they'd cut for firewood and left lying until they could use sleds to haul them. The whole country just opened right up."

Although Anne is pretty non-confrontational, she gets pissed off at one point in the story. I like this speech, even though it's sort of depressing.

"You asked me before why I came into this country. I'll tell you the truth. I thought I was going to find something wonderful here -- everything I ever dreamed about. Maybe that's stupid but that's what I thought. Well I found out one thing. People here aren't much different from the ones back in the States. The only difference is that here they can do anything they want, which means acting just about as mean and selfish as they can."

It is pretty messed up how people can just get away with anything -- both because it's the '20's when no one really cared about how bigoted and violent people were, and because they're in the middle of frickin nowhere. I mean, it would have been cool to have been a criminal there, but not so much a schoolteacher.

When the mail guy, Mr. Strong, comes to town a couple of times a month the school closes early, people get "dressed up" and stand outside waiting for him to get there. This is the kind of detail that makes the story ring true -- it's just cute.

"Jimmy and the rest of the kids were busy piling snow up at the edge of the settlement. They did it every time Mr. Strong was due in, built a barrier a few feet high just so they could watch Mr. Strong's horses kick it to pieces when they went through it."

Kids are so retarded.

Review

I can't say enough about the writing. Robert Specht was from New York City and he graduated from CCNY at the late age of 32. There he won "top awards in both short story and essay competitions." Well earned, I'm sure, Mr. Specht.

There is an honesty in Anne's perspective that feels timeless. She was clearly a strong and open-minded person, intelligent, infinitely compassionate...sexy. The book really conveys her humanity and she's easy to identify with even though the circumstances she's in are not. I don't want to give too much of the book away because you should read it for yourself, but the book has a definite story to it and you'll be sucked in right away, I'm sure.

I am reminded of Julie of the Wolves, another book about a girl in Alaska that knocked me on my ass -- it was so good. Maybe this is my new thing, books about girls in Alaska. Seriously, it's one of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking books I've read in a long time.

Anyway -- guess how many Ampersands Tisha gets!? That's right! The coveted FIVE Ampersands!!! & & & & &

Stay tuned for my next book -- "How Green Was My Valley" -- Tisha will be a hard act to follow. Just like A Few Good Men.