Turning again to history, Hill presents a contribution to Pleasant Company's popular 'Girls of Many Lands' series in Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway. A local murder threatens to inflame local cultural differences, and when the region is annexed to the United States, Erinia and her neighbors must learn to adapt to a third culture and become American Alaskans. Erinia Pavaloff lives on a cultural divide her father is half Russian and half Tlingit while her mother is Athabascan, and her parents' trading post is located on the physical border between these same two worlds. Set in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Dancing at the Odinochka follows a girl's coming of age as she grows up in the isolation of a Russian Alaskan trading post.

In addition to causing him to reevaluate his feelings toward Charley, Deet's reaction to having a parent in prison-including his self-absorbed worries about what his friends at school will think about him-gradually gives way to the realization that many of his assumptions about people are worth reexamining.

While many teachers have come and gone - some lasting only a few weeks - Miss Agnes is here to stay and inspires Fred and her friends with her creativity and excitement over learning.ĭo Not Pass Go, Deet is a middle grader whose world comes crashing down when his stepfather, Charley, is arrested and sent to jail for possessing drugs. In her third novel, The Year of Miss Agnes, Hill introduces readers to ten-year-old Frederika, whose feelings about schoolwork change drastically when a new teacher named Miss Agnes comes to the small, one-room schoolhouse in Frederika’s remote Abathascan village. Falls through the ice, attacks by moose, and the endless search for enough firewood to keep the trappers warm punctuate an experience during which Sister learns to abhor the cruelty of animal trapping. In Hill’s second novel, 1994’s Winter Camp, Toughboy and Sister return, children have found a new home with their neighbor, an elderly Alaskan woman named Natasha, who brings them with her to her winter trapping camp during the month of October. Eleven-year-old John and his sister, nine-year-old Annie Laurie, find themselves left in this remote area and must rely on their wits to survive.

The book tells the story of two Athabascan Indian children, who are forced to survive on their own after their mother dies during childbirth and their father, an alcoholic who cannot get over the loss of his wife, meets his death in a boating accident at a fishing camp on the Yukon River. With the editor’s help, Toughboy and Sister was published in 1990. When circumstances allowed her the time, she decided to try her hand at writing a children’s book. She worked as a teacher for more than thirty years, most of that time in the Alaskan bush. Hill began her career as an elementary school teacher.

Minuk by Kirkpatrick Hill