My Abandonment

Rock, Peter. My Abandonment. New York: John Murray 2018. Print

First Sentences:

Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush.  

There's nothing to do but keep walking, you have to be ready for everything and I am as I follow behind Father down out of the trees, around a puddle, to the fence of the salvage yard. It's night.

Description:

Based on a true life situation, Peter Rock's My Abandonment retraces the lives of man and his thirteen-year-old daughter who live off the grid, hidden in a vast nature park outside the city of Portland, Oregon. Narrated clearly by the young girl, Caroline, we get a peak at their day to day existence over the past four years after the death of her mother. She and her father live in a self-made shelter, tend a small garden, even read from their small library of sorts as they live off the lands.

Until they are discovered by a passing jogger ...

Then everything changes. Of course, they are taken from the park, separated, questioned with suspicion, and finally relocated with another family that offers work and shelter. Although living in the confines of society is tremendously difficult for the father, Caroline tries to become part of her new life. Escape for both of them is planned, but that is just the beginning of their adventure.

This is a wonderful book, full of passion, strength, inventiveness, and adaptation. All characters are believable as are their intentions to do good in the world for themselves and those around them. It just is a bad fit for this father interacting with the outside world and people.

I really enjoyed it as you can tell and highly recommend it to anyone looking for unique characters who test themselves against challenging everyday situations. If nothing else, you can watch the excellent movie based on this true story, Leave No Trace, with Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie ably playing the father and daughter. Both film and book are well worth your time and attention.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Mejia, Mindy. Leave No Trace.   

[This is a book, not the film based on My Abandonment. Confusing, I know.] 

When Lucas, a teenage boy who has been missing for ten years, emerges from the Boundary Waters forest in Minnesota, he is violent and uncommunicative. Involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility, he comes under the observation of Maya, a lowly language therapist who somehow is able to win Lucas' trust, and slowly his story slowly unfolds.  (previously reviewed here)