TWO OLD WOMEN
1993 Western States Book Award Winner
1994 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award Winner
“A beautiful and moving book. [Wallis’s] writing is as lean and muscular, as full of unexpected bounties as the far north, and readers are sure to be delighted with Two Old Women.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Wallis, who grew up hearing this tribal legend, retells it with disarming simplicity and grace.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wallis writes with simple elegance. . . . Powerful themes emerge from the story’s bleak premise: friendship, dignity and a ‘We will die trying’ grittiness—themes that still permeate the Alaskan way of life.”
—Alaska
“In Two Old Women, Velma Wallis provides the reader with a lasting experience. Myth takes hold of us; we become old and abandoned, and we are a friend who says, ‘We will die trying.’ And the world hears this voice of confidence. Wherever we are—in the city, in the village, in the bush—we need this tale of isolation and the power to define a vision of human integrity.”
—Western States Book Award jurors