In HEROES OF THE FRONTIER, Dave Eggers turns the narrative of western exploration and adventure on its head, giving a single mother and her two children the opportunity for self-discovery, reinvention and danger amid the Alaskan wilds.

Josie’s biggest problem (and she has a lot of them) is that she has never been content to simply occupy the life she is living. She has never been comfortable in her own skin or satisfied with her own lot. Instead, her vivid imagination always works overtime, envisioning all the countless future possibilities she is being denied by virtue of having only a single life to live. At times, having been raised on a steady diet of Broadway show tunes, she imagines life’s absurdities as if they’ve been scored by Rogers and Hammerstein or Sondheim, dreaming up the plot for lavish productions like “Norway!”or “Disappointed: The Musical.”

"[HEROES OF THE FRONTIER is] full of small details, offbeat scenes and genuine hilarity, making it a novel that, like the Alaskan frontier, can both reward and surprise around every turn."

Right now, Josie is taking a rare opportunity (at least since she “settled down” as an adult) to seize one of those alternative futures. Emotionally, professionally and financially devastated by a series of tragedies and scandals, Josie sets off on a whim for Alaska, taking her children --- eight-year-old Paul and five-year-old Ana --- without telling their no-good dad where they’re going. On the surface of things, she’s going to visit her quasi-stepsister, Sam. But along the way, she begins to wonder if she isn’t looking for something different, something bigger.

The Alaska that Josie, Paul and Ana discover is a place of beauty, but it’s also a place of violence, both natural and man-made. They encounter guns, arrows, threats and cruise ships full of self-centered Americans. As they travel the highways in an RV that has seen better days, their explorations are curtailed by the threat of forest fire, as countless infernos ring the area.

But despite all this, despite Josie’s cynicism and near-hopelessness at times, she is still struck more than once by the feeling that this escape, this time away from ordinary life and its limitations and expectations, is exactly what she and her children, both old-before-his-time Paul and impetuous Ana, need at this moment in their lives. Is it possible that this whim of a trip is actually offering them something far grander and more important than even she ever imagined? Josie watches her children play, free of time limits, homework and extracurricular activities, and thinks to herself, “This was the common criminal pursuit of all contemporary humankind. Give my child an Ikea desk and twelve hours a day of sedentary typing. This will mean success for me, them, our family, our lineage. She would not pursue this. She would not subject her children to this. They would not seek these specious things, no. It was only about making them loved in a moment in the sun.”

HEROES OF THE FRONTIER is full of profound moments like this, many of them reflections on parenting, maturing, and letting go of some dreams while grasping others. It’s also, however, full of small details, offbeat scenes and genuine hilarity, making it a novel that, like the Alaskan frontier, can both reward and surprise around every turn.