Julie

Julie is a novel by the American writer Jean Craighead George, published in 1994 and a sequel to her earlier book about the same character.

Julie returns to her father's village in the Arctic, where she is caught between the expectations of the community and what she learned while living on the tundra with a wolf pack. The wolves are the immediate problem. The village depends on hunting, and the herd of caribou the wolves also depend on is failing, so the animals Julie has befriended are regarded as a threat to food supply rather than as neighbours. She has to argue their case in a place where tradition, economics and the state of the environment all point in another direction. A young Siberian man arrives in the village, and their developing relationship gives her a second reason to think about what her life will look like. The novel is set in a changing Arctic, where the old patterns of hunting and moving with the seasons are becoming harder to maintain.

George writes about the natural world from inside it, and her heroine's loyalties are divided between the people she belongs to and the animals she has lived with.