The first half, maybe two thirds, of this book were heading for 5 stars, and then it just became like a soap opera of stupid decisions and disastrous events. By the time the "big" event happens Leni is 18 and has already had more than her fair share of trauma heaped on her, so why the author felt the need to spend the rest of the book piling more and more on her, I do not know. There was plenty established up to that point, for all the main characters, to keep the story going without resorting to calamity after calamity. And worst of all, I felt like all of these events kept the characters from really dealing with any of the stuff from the first half of the book. These big events became the focus of their lives going forward and the things from before were kind of talked around. As a result I found the end of the book highly unsatisfying. 

In some ways this book really reminded me of Where The Crawdads Sing, in that there is an extremely strong sense of place, and the setting, Alaska in this case, becomes a character in it's own right. However, just like with Crawdads, I was left with the feeling that the place is what the author really wanted to write about and the characters and events are almost secondary to that. 

Also, for a book that dedicates itself to strong women there still seems to be an awful lot of men dictating events for the women in the story. It's probably realistic for the time and place, but still, I found it increasingly hard to care about the things that happened to some of the male characters because they were basically doing it to themselves, and causing more problems for the women in the process. And a thing that happens to Leni about half way through felt like it only happened to get the required reaction from her dad, but then it dictated the entire rest of the story, and it didn't really work for me. There were other ways that series of events could have transpired, ways that could have led to a much more interesting last third of the book.