Julie of the Wolves
by Jean Craighead George
Summary
Miyax, a thirteen year old Inupiat girl who also answers to her English name Julie, sets out walking across the Alaskan tundra toward San Francisco, planning to reach a pen pal after fleeing a marriage arranged for her that has turned frightening; her intellectually disabled husband, a boy named Daniel, has tried to force himself on her, and Miyax has run rather than stay. Alone on the open tundra with no food and no clear way to survive, she turns to the traditional skills her father once taught her, patiently studying a nearby wolf pack's body language and vocal signals until the animals accept her as one of their own, feeding her from their kills and letting her den near them through a stretch of brutal weather. Interwoven with her survival is the story of how she got here: raised by her father, Kapugen, after her mother's death, then sent to live with a distant aunt and attend an English speaking school when Kapugen is presumed lost at sea, a loss that leaves Miyax caught between the traditional Inupiat life she was raised in and the encroaching modern world the school represents. Nearing the end of her journey, Miyax discovers that her father is alive after all, remarried and now living in a way that blends old ways with snowmobiles and modern conveniences she does not recognize, a discovery that forces her to choose, one final time, which version of her own life and name she actually wants.
Reading it means moving between two very different registers, close observational nature writing about wolf behavior, drawn from real field research, and a harder edged coming of age story about assault, cultural loss, and survival. George never softens either strand for a younger audience, which has made the book as valued for its science as it is unsettling for the scene of attempted assault that sends Miyax onto the tundra in the first place.
Historical Context & Significance
Harper and Row published Julie of the Wolves in 1972, and the American Library Association gave Jean Craighead George the 1973 Newbery Medal for it over three honor books, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Together, Johanna Reiss's The Upstairs Room, and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Witches of Worm. It was also a National Book Award finalist in the children's books category and later won Germany's 1975 Youth Literature Award.
The children's literature scholar John Rowe Townsend praised the wolf material as totally absorbing while judging the human story around it somewhat thin. The novel has repeatedly drawn censorship challenges for its scene of attempted marital rape, including a 1996 removal from a Pennsylvania school's sixth grade reading list, and it ranks among the American Library Association's hundred most challenged books of the 1990s. A 2004 review by the Inupiaq teacher Martha Stackhouse also raised concerns about inaccuracies in the novel's portrayal of Inupiat culture and language, criticism that has followed the book's classroom use since. George based Miyax partly on a real Inupiaq woman, Julia Sebevan, who taught her about traditional life during research trips to Barrow, Alaska.