ROAD SONG by Natalie Kusz (HarperPerennial:...

ROAD SONG by Natalie Kusz (HarperPerennial: $10). In 1969, when Natalie Kusz was 6, her family moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, in search of a freer, more wholesome life. During their first winter, Kusz was savagely attacked by a neighbor’s sled dogs, receiving extensive head injuries that included the loss of one eye and part of her jaw. During the next several years, she endured a lengthy series of reconstructive and plastic surgeries, including painful bone and skin grafts. Kusz emerges from these pages as a pleasantly unassuming woman with an endearing streak of defiant obstinacy. However, the reader quickly loses patience with her ineffectual parents, whose determination to pursue a vague Thoreauvian idyll condemned their children to a life of grinding poverty in an inhospitable backwater. Rather than relocate near the urban hospitals where Natalie was receiving treatment, they stayed in Fairbanks, hitchhiking with her through the bitter Alaskan winter to obtain post-operative care. Their limply pious principles kept them from preparing their injured child for the cruel taunts of “Cyclops” she received from the children at school: Her namby-pamby upbringing makes her survival doubly impressive. This rich yet frustrating memoir was nominated for a Times Book Prize.