Natalie Kusz

EXcellent book! Lemme emphasize that, okay? ROAD SONG, by Natalie Kusz. Simply EXcellent. Kusz's story of her childhood and young adulthood is a combination tale of fierce family love and, often, desperate deprivation and poverty, in the unforgiving conditions of the Alaskan "outback" in the 1970s. The life was chosen by her parents, who chucked a middle class life in California to live in the "sticks" of Alaska. Her father was a Polish immigrant with a tragic story of DP camps and family separation during and after the war; her mother feared inherting the paranoid schizophrenia of her own mom.

Kusz's story of the family's decision to move to Alaska, traveling the Al-Can highway and meeting other unconventional sorts seems fairly straightforward and unremarkable for the first fifty pages or so, but then seven year-old Natalie is mauled and horribly disfigured (nearly killed) by a vicious sled dog, and years - literally 'years' - of hospitalizations and reconstructive surgery involving long separations and crippling debt take over the Kusz family's life.

Kusz, who lost an eye, in the dog attack, is quite unsentimental in her depiction of her own plight, but shows uncommon understanding of how it affects the family dynamic over the next several years. Her descriptions of the cruelty of other children - to her and her siblings are both schocking and heartbreaking.

The writing is eloquent and wise beyond the years of the author, who, despite her own and other family tragedies, manages to make something of her life, overcoming enormous adversity. I have nothing but admiration for Natalie Kusz. At the risk of being redundant, this is an EXcellent book!… (mere)