Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

That pretty much sums up Allan W. Eckert, author of Incident at Hawk’s Hill (a 1972 Newbery Honor book).  It was an interesting book, to say the least; a six-year-old with an affinity for animals spends two months lost on the Canadian prairie, cared for by a badger who has recently lost her young.  According to Eckert, it’s a slightly fictionalized account of an actual incident, which is incredible but not impossible (truth being absolutely stranger than fiction).  He does a good job portraying the boy’s parents and their conflicting worries for their son, although the third person omniscient gives the whole book a certain detached feel.  (You can tell that, in writing the book, he’s simply taking his observations of nature one step further.)  He also, however, exhibits a certain tendency to give a little more information about the habits of wildlife than a true novelist would.  I was interested in the statistics on prairie dog towns, actually, and I looked up ‘spermophiles’ because I was curious–it’s a genus of ground squirrels, by the way–but I’m not so sure that the average young reader will be (interested and curious, I mean).  To be fair, the plot might still draw them, and there’s certainly action.  It also moves fairly quickly, extra details not withstanding.  (I loved Atlas Shrugged, but Ayn Rand could have taken a lesson or two from this guy.  That 50-page radio speech just rehashed everything the previous 900 pages had covered already.)  Overall, then, I’d recommend it to anyone with a decent interest in wildlife–or North American western history.