first book I can recall really getting into when I was about 8 was this.
My Side of the Mountain
I spoke with the Author via email about 5-6 years ago and explained how I loved this book and still own copies of it..
She was thrilled and extremely nice.. had no clue the author was female and a falconer herself..
Died May 15, 2012 (aged 92)[SUP][/SUP]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain
The book is about Sam Gribley, a teenage boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters. He decides to run away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The novel begins in the middle of Sam's story, with Sam huddled in his treehouse home in the forest during a severe blizzard. The reader meets Frightful, Sam's pet peregrine falcon, and The Baron, a weasel that Sam befriends. Roughly the first 80 percent of the novel is Sam's reminiscences about how he came to be in a home made out of a hollowed-out tree in a terrible snowstorm, while the remainder of the novel is a traditional linear narrative about what happens after the snowstorm.
My Side of the Mountain
I spoke with the Author via email about 5-6 years ago and explained how I loved this book and still own copies of it..
She was thrilled and extremely nice.. had no clue the author was female and a falconer herself..
Died May 15, 2012 (aged 92)[SUP][/SUP]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain
The book is about Sam Gribley, a teenage boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters. He decides to run away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The novel begins in the middle of Sam's story, with Sam huddled in his treehouse home in the forest during a severe blizzard. The reader meets Frightful, Sam's pet peregrine falcon, and The Baron, a weasel that Sam befriends. Roughly the first 80 percent of the novel is Sam's reminiscences about how he came to be in a home made out of a hollowed-out tree in a terrible snowstorm, while the remainder of the novel is a traditional linear narrative about what happens after the snowstorm.