Book review: ‘Growing Down’ is a tale of the human spirit rising up through hardship

“Growing Down: A Novel of Reminiscence and Remembrance” by Sarah Kavasharov, 188 pages, 2013.
The Matanuska Valley is a place that embraces some of its roots and downplays others. There are many business and street names that refer to the Colonists, a group that came to Alaska as part of a farming experiment in the 1930s. Before that there were Alaska Native tribes that lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Russians arrived in 1741 and then the Alaska purchase and the whites came in.
“Growing Down,” written by Sarah Kavasharov, tells of the story of a family with ten children and focuses on the experiences of their daughter Annie. The inside page of the book says it is fiction, but bookseller Ruth Hulbert, of Fireside Books in Palmer, told me that it is “fiction based on true stories.” 

The first chapters are told simply through the protagonist Annie’s eyes as a little girl, and the story gains complexity as she is forced to leave her family’s homestead after losing her mother to alcoholism, and then her father to a heart attack. But fear not, readers: while “Growing Down” is sad, it is about resilience. 

Spoiler alert: she makes it!
Along the way, Kavasharov depicts the landscape of the South Central region of the then Territory of Alaska and the people Annie encounters. She illustrates how Annie had to take on a leadership role for her younger siblings Elizabeth and Jeannie, when they were all put into foster care. 

Kavasharov presents the family dynamics of the foster families that Annie and her sisters lived with, giving a glimpse into how child welfare was handled during territorial days. Life just happened to her and her sisters in foster care, they had no autonomy.
Always in the midst of the sadness, there is nature. The earth was Annie’s rock as a child. The name of the book, “Growing Down,” is explained in the preface and refers to Buddha leaving his protected home and stepping onto the earth. 

At her worst moments, Annie, who grows and becomes Anne, is saved by nature: when she falls, nature is always there to catch her physically and metaphorically.

There is a scene of Anne in church on Easter. She was thinking that “there was something disturbing in tales about a dead man coming out of a cave – out of his tomb,” when her eye was caught by some white flowers, Easter lilies, which she had never seen. 

“It was magical, not believable, that there could be things so gloriously in bloom reaching marvelous full life out of the frozen cold.”
Depictions of abuse, prejudices and hardship inflicted upon Annie and her family by colonists, religious people, and teachers are felt by readers. From these same groups, so too do readers see those who reached out to Anne with help as she got older.
There is a cycle of abuse of which modern society is aware of, but in Anne’s time, was seldom acknowledged and resources were sparse for those caught up in it. 

Anne’s Aleut mother was named Theresa. Readers get  glimpses of Theresa throughout the book and see her quick decline due to alcoholism. Anne saw her father go from loving her mother to his opinion of her changing after the colonists came, and he “let the general prejudice sway him.” Theresa is given her own chapter at the end of the book to talk about her life.
“Growing Down” reminds readers that the past is made of strong people but also flawed people. We can reflect and ask ourselves: have we become better?
The book has a niche audience: tourists and Alaska history buffs who want to read about Alaska’s history will appreciate it because it shows a facet of Alaska that often gets overlooked. Social work, human services, and psychology students will appreciate it for the insight it offers to people coping under duress. 

I enjoyed “Growing Down” for its themes of “child vs. world and overcoming,” but as a student and lover of literature that pertains to flora, I also appreciated it for references to flowers and interactions with nature and what these did for the child becoming an adult.
“Growing Down” is self published but can be found with a quick Google search at many locations.

‍