My Side of the Mountainby Jean Craighead George (1959)
My year 5 teacher read this aloud to the class, and it had an immediate and lasting impression on me, right from the first chapter. The whole premise just struck a chord in me, it's like a young boy's ultimate scenario. Young Sam Gribley runs away from home (New York) to the Catskill Mountains, where he lives in a giant hollow tree. He learns to fish, make fire, make his own clothes and tames a falcon.
Awesome. It's like Bear Grylls The Early Years. It set me off for years of searching around the bushland where I lived, to find some sort of hollow tree to set up shop in. To no avail.
The book is very likable, and easy to read. The one thing that struck me though, reading it back as an adult, is where the heck are his folks, and why do they wait so long to come and find him. But, when you're a kid, you don't care about such trivialities. You just care about that sweet hollow tree fantasy.
2 comments:
Excellent book! We read it in class when I was at school and recently I read it to my own children. I was surprised at how much of the book I remembered.
Hi Narelle, thanks for stopping by:)
Out of interest, when you re-read it as an adult, did it seem wierd to you that the parents didn't come looking for him earlier, and allowed him to stay there?
But yeah- awesome book!
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