Sam Gribley is twelve and miserable in a crowded New York City apartment. He leaves with a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and flint and steel, walks to his grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskills, hollows out a big hemlock, and lives in it for a year. Jean Craighead George wrote it, it is a Newbery Honor book, and the publisher puts it past four million copies sold. It has been handed to children for generations, and it holds up because it is specific.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it sits on our Stealth Science shelf. Your child thinks they are reading a runaway story. What they are actually reading is a year of applied biology and plain engineering, worked out in order, with the reasons attached.
Start with the falcon. Sam takes a young peregrine from a cliff nest and trains her, and the book never pretends she comes back because she loves him. She comes back because he controls when she eats. Falconry runs on hunger and weight, and a child who reads this comes away holding the single most useful idea in animal training: a trained animal is a fed animal, and the timing of the food is the whole lever.
Then the fire. The first fires Sam builds inside a hollow tree fill the tree with smoke and nearly end the experiment before winter properly starts. Smoke does not leave a closed room on its own. Hot air has to have somewhere to go and cold air has to have somewhere to come in. He has to cut a chimney and give the fire a draft before the tree is a house instead of a flue with a boy in it.
Then food, which is where most survival books wave their hands. Sam forages, and the book is honest that a wild plant is not automatically food. Some of what he eats is safe or edible only after it has been dried, boiled or leached. That is chemistry, and it is the difference between eating and being poisoned.
Then keeping the food. He smokes and dries and salts meat, because water is what lets rot happen, and pulling the water out is how people got through winters for most of human history.
Running under all of it is a calendar kept by animals and plants instead of by a date. Sam knows where he is in the year by which birds have gone, which have come back, what is up in the woods and what has died back. That has a name, phenology, and it is a real field with real researchers in it.
A child who finishes this book knows how a fire draws, why a trained falcon returns, and what has to happen to meat before it will keep. That is a lot of science to smuggle into a story about a boy who ran away.
The child it lands with
The one who builds things. The one with a knife, a project and a pile of sticks behind the house. The one who reads how-to books for fun and then goes and tries it in the yard.
It also lands with the child who is not a strong reader yet but is a strong noticer. The sentences are short, the chapters are short, and nearly every one of them contains something a person could actually go and do.
It is a better first Jean Craighead George than Julie of the Wolves, because the danger in this one is weather and hunger rather than people. If your child is nine or ten and you want her nature writing without the harder content, this is the door.
One place to stop and talk
Stop the first time the fire smokes Sam out of his own tree, before he solves it, and ask your child what is wrong.
Most children will say the fire is too big. It is not. Let that answer sit for a minute, then ask the better question: where is the smoke supposed to go, and what is supposed to come in behind it? A fire is a pump. It pulls cool air in low and pushes hot air out high, and a hollow tree with a boy and a fire inside it and nothing open at the top is a chimney with the lid on. Sam does not need a smaller fire. He needs a hole and a draft.
Let them work that out at the table with their hands before you read another page. Then watch Sam arrive at the same answer himself. A child who solves a problem five minutes before the book solves it reads the rest of the book as a builder instead of as an audience, and that is a different child by the end of the winter.
What to know going in
This book is far gentler than Julie of the Wolves. There is no attack on a person and nothing sexual in it anywhere. That is worth saying plainly, because the two books get shelved side by side and parents assume they carry the same weight. They do not.
What it does have is animal death, close up and unsentimental. Sam gets deer, and the book stays with him while he skins and butchers them and turns the hide into clothing. He traps and eats small animals. His falcon kills in front of him and he is pleased about it, because that is dinner. A child who is upset by a hunting scene will be upset here several times over. A child who lives where people hunt will not blink.
The second thing is bigger, and it is the real reason to talk before you hand the book over. Almost everything Sam does would get an adult cited today. Taking a young raptor out of a wild nest is regulated and needs a license. Taking deer out of season without one is poaching. Building a permanent camp on land you do not own is not a thing a person may do. The book was written in another era and it raises none of it. If your child is the kind who reads a book as an instruction manual, and some of them are exactly that kind, have that conversation early rather than after they have gone looking for a nest.
Third, the loneliness is real. There is a stretch of deep winter where Sam is genuinely alone, and the book lets it sit heavy instead of cheering it up.
And the ending will annoy some readers. Sam's solitude does not last, and the way it ends is neither a disaster nor a triumph. Some children close the book satisfied. Others feel the thing they loved was taken from them. Either reaction is normal, and it is better to be ready for it than surprised by it.
Where to get it
The two Jean Craighead George books in this set both run $9.99, so choosing between them is a question about your child rather than about money. For a nine or ten year old, start here: My Side of the Mountain, the Puffin Modern Classics paperback, and leave Julie of the Wolves for a year or two on. The rest of what we vet this way is on the Stealth Science shelf.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Mrs. Frisby: The One With a Real Plot
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C O'Brien
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
