Book Review

Tisha 

The wonderful True Love Story Of A Young Teacher In the Alaskan Wilderness                           As Told to Robert Specht

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003IN4AM0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 You almost immediately begin to think of this young, untried, naive young girl by the same title she's labeled with at the very beginning of her story: Teacher. This is a first person narrative, and neither she nor the writer ever seem to consider her real name of any importance.

Hence the title of our book because one of the children she comes to love pronounces it "Tisha."

 Born into what we would now consider a very dynsfunctional family, she found her love and sanity in a wise and God-fearing grandmother. The heroine of our story finds her nitche very young in the calling of teaching. With her grandmother dead, the idealistic nineteen year old decides to heed the call of adventure by bringing literacy to a remote area of the Alaskan wilderness. 

Remote is hardly the word for it. Neither is adventure. Tisha has plenty of both, growing up along the way she has to rely upon residents of Chicken, Alaska's kindness and generosity to help her even survive in the beginning. 

 But learn she does, earning the respect and liking of students, parents, and all who come to know her.  Tisha is a young woman of amazing resiliency, capable of great kindness, insight, and a strong enough personality with sense of right and wrong to hold her ground against some very in-grained prejudices. 

Did I mention she falls in love along the way? She does, and breaks a lot of current social rules of the time and community by who with. 

Teacher was an elderly woman when the story of her early years in Alaska was published.

At that time I saw her give an interview on a morning talk show, found the book and loved it. After a long search I rediscovered and re-read this never to be forgotten portion of Alaska history. 

Beware, the language is often very coarse because it is written down just as the rough characters of the time spoke it. These survivors were often a rough breed. 

None-the-less, strongly recommended.