North of Ordinary: How One Woman Left It All Behind for Wilderness and Wonder in Alaska’s Frozen Frontier

Alaska’s harsh conditions mirror a woman’s emotionally barren childhood in this intense debut memoir from Aikens, star of National Geographic’s Life Below Zero. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a distant mother who bounced between partners, Aikens learned self-reliance early. She didn’t ask many questions when her mother suddenly moved the family to Alaska—she just recalled the wilderness lessons she’d received from a Dakota elder whom she befriended while living in the Midwest. As Aikens unpacks the scars of her childhood, which left her with the “emotional capacity of a Ritz cracker,” she recalls moving to the Lower 48 and marrying two men in the 1980s, working as a trapper in Alaska, and finding peace by living in a remote campground in Alaska’s North Slope. Highlighting both the beauty and the heartbreak of bone-deep solitude, Aikens’s account captures the rugged appeal of life off the grid despite harrowing challenges, including a near-fatal bear attack (“Nothing on this earth can prepare you for the sound of your own skull cracking in the jaws of a grizzly”). Readers will find this exciting and uplifting. Agent: Byrd Leavell, UTA. (Mar.)