"Heroes of the frontier" by Dave Eggers

An audio book.

Josie, with daughter Anna (5) and Paul (8), is driving around Alaska in an old RV (nickname Chateau, max speed 48 mph). She's been separated from her useless husband Karl for 18 months. She had an adventurous late teens (unstable mother; travels abroad), eventually owning a dentist practise. But she feels guilty for encouraging a boy patient to enlist (he soon died) and she had to sell her practise to pay for missing a patient's oral cancer.

They have various adventures, meeting potential role models. Alaska is expensive and she's running out of money. They camp where they shouldn't and are talked to by the police. They squat, sometimes for weeks, in abandoned buildings. She thinks they're being chased. She's ambivalent about the single men she meets. She has bouts of rhapsody (often brought on by Nature, or seeing her kids happy) after which she does things she wouldn't normally do.

It's episodic. Some of the episodes feel too long - they might not be needed -

• They watch a magic show on a big cruise liner. She realises that the props need to be on wheels so that they can be turned.
• She employs a little band of musicians so she can develop a musical about Alaska.

There are insights and humourous events on the way. E.g.

• a pond existed because conservationists had campaigned to keep it for migratory birds
• "it's not as if they'd been burning money at the feet of orphans"
• She realises that single parents start using their oldest child as an advisor/confidant.

At the end they're evacuated because of forest fires. They might never see the RV (and the bag of money in it) again. They go on a mountain walk. There's a thunderstorm. She has to depend on her son's hand-written map to find cover. They find a shack prepared for a family reunion party - balloons and food. Snuggled naked under a blanket, gorging in front of a fire, they're all happy. This is where and who they're supposed to be, she thinks. The final chapter is very short - "But there is tomorrow".

Other reviews

• Alex Preston (Eggers paints a fine and sympathetic portrait of a life that is never quite unbearable, but never all that far off. ... I think Eggers is trying to tell us something about contemporary American life, about the meaning of courage in a world where danger appears only on television)
• Marcel Theroux (Throughout the book, her outrage is exquisitely articulated and very funny. The novel is studded with jeremiads on incivility and selfishness, on high-end grocery stores where the food is “curated”, on pushy cyclists and leaf blowers ... An alluring combination of Walt Whitman, Bridget Jones and an angry standup comedian, Josie is seduced by the hope of escape)