Book description: “Away Up the North Fork: A Girl’s Search for Home in the Wilderness” by Annie Chappell is a memoir set in the 1970s, chronicling the author’s journey as a troubled sixteen-year-old longing for a simpler, homesteading life like the one described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories. Growing up in Denver amid family turmoil—including parental discord, a mother’s alcoholism, and sexual abuse—Annie dreams of escape and finds hope in the rugged tales of Bill, a Vietnam vet and mountain man she meets during a break from boarding school.
Inspired by Bill’s wilderness lifestyle near the Canadian border in Montana, Annie forms a plan to join him. After a dramatic attempt to run away during her senior year is thwarted, she returns to finish school but continues to correspond with Bill. After graduation and with her parents’ grudging approval, she moves to Montana to live with him. The reality of homesteading with an older man turns out to be more challenging than anticipated, revealing both the difficulties of a primitive lifestyle and Bill’s complex, sometimes troubling personality.
This was another great read, as I have a sort of fixation with wilderness life and solitude, though not to the same extent the author has.
#nonfiction #memoir #wilderness #books bookstodon group (npub1ny7…uv57)
