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

A touching book I read in grade school.

A great coming-of-age tale

I don't understand why this book received so many awards. I thought it was so completely unrealistic.
The book is about a boy who runs away from home and decides to live in the woods on his own. Now I have read and enjoyed books of people living in the wilderness. Hatchet by Gary Paulson was one of the best books I read last year. The difference between those two is that in Hatchet the boy is forced to live and survive in the wilderness because of a plane crash. In this book however the boy decides to live and survive in the wilderness. This would be alright if it was just a kid's crazy dream. But the strange and absolutely unrealistic thing is that nobody seems to bother. People know that there is a boy living in the woods but nobody cares about it. The boy's father even comes into the forest to stay with him over Christmas and leaves again afterwards without taking his son home!
In the book it is not said how old the boy is. He could be anything from 10 to 17. If he is 17 I could understand that other people wouldn't care so much about him living alone in the woods. But one should think that his parents would be really worried anyway.
All this bothered me so much that I didn't really care about the rest of the story anymore.