Young adult novel about a girl who runs away to live like Thoreau?

May 23, 2007 1:18 PM

Do you know the title of this young adult novel? It was about a girl, possibly a foster child, runaway, or both, who goes to live in the woods like Thoreau. The more inside contains big spoilers!

The spoiler stuff is in the last paragraph.

The book is mostly in the first person - it's supposed to be a girl's diary. I believe the book is 100% fiction, but the conceit is that this is an actual diary, and there's a preface that sets this up.

The girl mentions Thoreau and wanting to live like him, and she runs away to do this. I think she's been a foster child. I cannot remember ANYTHING about how she lives during this time. That's why I want to find and re-read the book.

I would guess that it was written in the early 80s, and I read it around 1987.

At the end of the novel, the girl has decided to return to the real world. The book ends with a change in perspective, and an older couple who are driving on a freeway or busy street see a young girl fly into the air after being hit by a car. It was the narrator, and she is killed by the impact. Somehow it's woven into the story that her diary was found in her backpack, and it became this book.

Help, please!

posted by peep to writing & language (14 comments total)

The fiction-masquerading-as-real-diary conceit sounds like the cautionary (read: alarmist) tales of Beatrice Sparks, of Go Ask Alice fame, but I strongly doubt she'd write anything that had anything to do with Thoreau. Have you tried asking at LibraryThing?
posted by scratch at 1:44 PM on May 23, 2007

I doubt this is the one you're looking for, but the description reminded me of My Side of the Mountain which is about a boy who lives on his own and keeps a journal.
posted by chndrcks at 1:58 PM on May 23, 2007

It sounds similar to "My Side of the Mountain", by Jean George, though that's obviously not it since this one is about a boy named Sam and it was written in the sixties.

Still, you may want to start with her since I know she wrote some sequels. I think one of them was about Sam's sister.
posted by bondcliff at 2:03 PM on May 23, 2007

It's not by the author of My Side of the Mountain. I remember reading this book because I was so interested in My Side, but the ending was shocking and less likely to have come out of the late 50s or 60s. I would have read it in the early to mid 1980s and I would guess that it was written around then. So this probably doesn't help answer your questions, but it may at least confirm the details you noted.
posted by acoutu at 2:12 PM on May 23, 2007

Oh, yeah, I've read My Side of the Mountain as well and I even meant to mention it in my post. So I know it's not that.

Yes, acoutu - shocking describes it. I was crushed, and had never read a book that "broke the rules" like that before. Thanks for the answers so far.
posted by peep at 2:17 PM on May 23, 2007

This is a hard one!

The closest match I could find is the Island Keeper by Harry Mazer:

"Rich, fat, Cleo, 16, is desolate when her younger sister is killed in a boating accident. Their mother died in a car accident years earlier, their father is preoccupied with business, and their critical grandmother has shunted them off to various boarding schools and camps. Now Cleo, mournfully alone, decides to duck camp and spend the summer, secretly, on an island her father owns in Canada." (that's from a Kirkus review that's not on the Amazon page for the book)

However, there's no mention of the diary thing, and this tidbit from Google Books makes me think the ending may not be right? (spoiler warning, I guess)
posted by Siobhan at 5:14 PM on May 23, 2007

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King?
posted by longsleeves at 6:31 PM on May 23, 2007

Sorry, the link to amazon
posted by longsleeves at 6:39 PM on May 23, 2007

It's not the Island Keeper, and I've read the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - not that either. Thanks, though!
posted by peep at 6:45 PM on May 23, 2007

There's a sequel to My Side of the Mountain called On the Far Side of the Mountain about the original hero's sister. Published in 1990 which seems to fit your timeline, but I can't remember anything at all about it and the blurb was no help.
posted by nax at 7:22 PM on May 23, 2007

I don't know what it is, but I do know it's not On the Far Side of the Mountain.
posted by booksandlibretti at 7:51 PM on May 23, 2007

Helpful this is obviously not, but I know EXACTLY the novel you mean. My copy eludes me at the moment. It's called something like "Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker" and most of the book was a narrative of her search for herself while hitchhiking culminating in the stay in the woods. Google is only leading me astray...
posted by dreaming in stereo at 9:00 PM on May 23, 2007

OK, I feel like a total douche answering my own question, but it was dreaming in stereo's comment that led me to Amazon with new search terms. The book is Runaway's Diary by Marilyn Harris. I finally found it by searching Amazon only in Teen Books.

This totally sealed it for me that it was the right book. Thank you everyone!
posted by peep at 8:46 AM on May 24, 2007

Here's a tip that has helped me locate forgotten books. If you know even one word in the title (other than "the" of course), enter it as a search term on one of the used books sites like Powell's. I wanted to find a book I read when I was 13 (lo, these many years ago), and all I could remember was it was about a haunted house and had the word "folly" in the title. Went to Powell's and voila!--had to slog through about 50 hits, but it was there.
posted by nax at 5:54 PM on May 24, 2007