Outside Passage:: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

When the author was 11, she and her 13-year-old sister, Lillian, left San Francisco's Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they had spent the previous two years, to join their mother, Rose, who had opened a road house in the mining town of Taylor Creek, Alaska. In beautifully written, understated prose, Scully, a former editor of Modern Photography, describes an unusual domestic life in the early 1940s peopled with poker players, reindeer herders and her mother's married lover, set against the landscape of the tundra. The author describes vividly her mother's determined spirit that could not be crushed either by the suicide of her husband, whose body was discovered by the children, or the difficulties of caring for Julia and Lillian during harsh economic times. Through the distorted prism of time, Scully also remembers and struggles to understand what she and her sister felt, and denied feeling, about their anguished time in the orphanage. A perceptive and sensitive account. Author tour. (Apr.)