5. My Side of the Mountain

Book 5: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (A - )


Georgina Deeb

I forget how horrible and awful George's ending are typically are. In Vulpes the Red Fox, she killed off the fox after a big hunt with a single shot and that was it!!! In this book, a boy named Sam runs away to his grandfather's land in the mountains and begins to live for a year in the woods. It's not because of some distaste for consumerism. It's not because he wants to be Thoreau though he is called that by his friend "Bando," a lost school teacher. It's because he's a young boy at that age where they want to run away from home. So he does. He tames a peregrine falcon, lives off the land on nuts and meats, and turns a hemlock tree into a house.

But the ending SUCKS!!!! Acceptable endings would have been:

1. Sam decides for himself to return to New York City
2. His family shows up to collect him and Sam mysteriously disappears but some people whisper they see a "wild boy" in the Rockies or in Appalachia
3. Sam dies!!! Even this is better than the actual ending, like in the film Into the Wild, which is based off a true runaway

The actual ending is Sam's entire family that he ran away from shows up on his mountain and immediately begins to build an actual house. Sam calls them out on it, saying "you're ruining everything!" and he's right! And then not even four sentences later, the boy shrugs and gives up. And, his family moves in and builds an actual house just because the mother got offended by how journalists described her in newspaper editorials. George writes such beautiful, beautiful books about the forest and the wild then ends them like this!! I wanted to throw the book against the wall. If it weren't for such a horrible ending, this book would have an A+. I forgot how amazing the book is since I last read it in 7th grade. But that freaking ending!!! It makes me want to scream.
Otherwise, the book is unbelievable starting with a boy in a tree worrying about a snowstorm then flashing back to the beginning of the journey. There is so much character in the boy written on a level for middle school students but just as enjoyable for adults as well. I hope that the two sequels, The Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful's Mountain, aren't tainted by the Gribley family trying to modernize everything.