Another from NPR's Backseat Book Club list. I was reading through What's that Book on reddit and someone posted about a book where a kid lives in the forest in a burned out tree. Another poster identified the book as My Side of the Mountain. That description made me want to finally read the book. 

 

I ended up really enjoying it. It's like all the best parts of Hatchet without the divorce story line and repetitive writing. I am (as I have said before) very into these books where kids live off the land on their own. 

I really needed a win after starting (and giving up on) 3 separate books so when I picked up My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George I felt pretty confident considering it was a Newberry Honor winner. The introduction made me laugh because it was all about the author's experience running away from home and coming back very shortly afterward. (I was gone such a short amount of time when I was a kid that my mom didn't even know that I'd left.) This book gave me strong Hatchet vibes from the outset. Our main character, Sam Gribley, doesn't so much as run away as inform his family that he is going to leave and live off the ancestral family land in the Catskills. Like most parents, they think he's bluffing and that he'll be back shortly...but he doesn't come back. He actually makes it to the Catskills and proceeds to become self-sufficient. He learns how to strike flint for fire, smoke out a tree to make a warm home, train a falcon to hunt wild game, sew a deerskin outfit, and develop varied (and tasty) recipes. This is a story of survival, independence, and the beauty of nature. It turned out to be exactly what I needed to get past the duds I'd recently picked. If you (or a reader in your life) enjoy fast paced adventure stories that are heavily descriptive (with intermittent pencil illustrations) My Side of the Mountain is for you. 8/10

 

 

What I'm Currently Reading: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (reread) and The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Earlier this year, Wanda set up a reading list for this summer which looked ever so delightful and I wanted in on the fun.

 

I won't be able to read all the books on the list but am looking to read as many of the following short-list as I can:

 

1. The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

2. White Fang by Jack London

3. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

4. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

5. The Adventures of Tintin by Herge

 

Happy reading!

 

BT

A friend at university had a comic book with one of the world's greatest titles: "Beautiful stories for ugly children."

Here we have another one, a Newberry Winner no less.

Two forebodings that dogged me throughout were 1) It read like research that wasn't fully understood. 2) The author has a very English-sounding name.

So...I have some idea how wolves raise their young, how Eskimo compasses are built, and how sleds are made from nothing but ice and string, but this book doesn't give enough explanation to safely do any of those things.

That's not the point of course. She was never going to let a 13 year old girl stay in the wilderness any length of time.

It's the last line of Julie's last song on the last page which is the most troubling:
"That the hour of the wolf and the Eskimo is over."

My Russian(?) reference book tells me that the Inuit are still spread out across Greenland, Russia, Canada and the U.S.