About book Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through The Wild (2014)
I really liked Carpenter’s first book, “Farm City.” This book focuses primarily on her reclusive father, but also highlights her parent’s marriage, and Carpenter’s lifetime struggle trying to understand her dad’s erratic behavior and what caused his abandonment of the family. She makes several attempts at reconciliation with him.A friend of her father’s writes to her about her father, “He was like a butterfly, here today, gone tomorrow type of guy. I read once—a friend is one who overlooks your broken fence and admires the flowers in your garden. He overlooked my faults and I overlooked his.” Novella, as his daughter, has a harder time forgiving the past, letting go of expectations of what she thought her father-daughter relationship should be, and figure out how to give up romanticizing what she wanted and accept what little her father was capable of giving. She comes to understand that wanting to know where we come from is universal and important in trying to make sense of our own lives, and that becoming a parent herself was the motivation in continuing to pursue her father. Well written and engaging. I read this book over two days. Whatever her next book is about, I want to read it. I'm not sure I like this woman very much. She's too much like a whole lot of the people I've known since the 1960's in Berkeley. Too self-righteously progressive. She has an urban farm in Oakland, raising animals and vegetables for food, making pets out of them and then killing them and keeping rabbit skins in her freezer or sending them off (her pigs) to the slaughter house. And not too self-examining. At nearly 40, she is still reacting and mourning her father's abandonment of her family and can't seem to pull it together. Jenny went to one of her lectures and she showed her decapitated pigs in a slideshow.
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Beautiful and easy to read real life story.**Recieved from Goodreads First Reader Giveaway.
—hunter123
A great story and well-written, but I didn't find it Earth-shattering
—Sammytheswagmaster
