Books like Julie by John Benton

A thirteen‑year‑old Inuit girl named Julie leaves home, is lost in Alaska’s tundra, and must survive by learning from the wolves that join her, while defying expectations of her people.

She learned the truth- the hard way

A disaster at sea left Julie Weston an orphan at eighteen with a young brother and sister to look after. Fortunately, money wasn't a problem—Julie's father, artist Conrad Weston, had made sure of that. But there were other problems. Aunt Harriet, for instance, who saw a chance to live in a style to which she had never been accustomed, if she could persuade Julie to let her move in and take care of the "poor children." And Baxter Coleman, the young lawyer handling the estate, still young and good-looking enough to see himself as the husband of a young and pretty heiress. But marriage wasn't on Julie's mind at all, as art student Michael Taggart knew only too well. Her concern was how to keep the family together, leading the kind of life she knew her mother and father would have wanted for them. Only after she made sure of that would she be free to think of her own happiness.

Connie, a troubled seventeen-year-old with an alcoholic mother, begins to use drugs and is arrested, but pulls her life together when she enters the Walter Hoving Home for girls (associated with the Teen Challenge program) and becomes a Christian.

In the frontier town where her parents work on the first transcontinental railroad, young Julie matures and must decide whether to pursue an aristocratic life with Samuel or a more daring path with handsome Dylan.