In spare, unsentimental prose, Key offers a convincing portrait of a young man who is practically a professional in the wilderness but still has a lot to learn when it comes to friendship. In his debut novel, Watt Key turns this genre on its head. In most other wilderness survival novels, young people must travel to the natural world in order to grow up. When he gets a chance to escape and live off the land once again, will he finally choose a lonely life in the wilderness, or can he learn to trust and live with other people who care for him When he lands in a juvenile detention center, Moon discovers that with the loss of his freedom, he gains good food and the first friends he's ever known. Instead, he gives Moon just one piece of advice before he dies from the infection that sets into the wound: head to Alaska, where he'll be able to find other people who live off the land just as Moon has learned to do.Īlaska's a long way from Alabama, though, and Moon soon finds himself on the run from the law. When Pap breaks his leg, he refuses to let Moon bring a doctor. Squatting in a one-room cabin in the middle of the Alabama forests, Moon and Pap have almost no other human contact.

Because of that, we don't owe anything to anybody. We never asked for anything and nobody ever gave us anything, Pap says. Pap has also taught Moon to distrust the government just as he does. All these things Moon has learned from his father.

He knows how to build a fire without a match, how to construct a simple shelter, how to shoot a deer from a hundred yards and how to make his own clothing from the hides. He knows where to find food in the forest, even in the middle of winter. Alabama Moon is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.Ten-year-old Moon Blake knows a lot. As the spirited and resourceful Moon encounters constables, jails, institutions, lawyers, true friends, and true enemies, he adapts his wilderness survival skills and learns to survive in the outside world, and even, perhaps, make his home there. But Moon is soon caught and entangled in a world he doesn’t know or understand he’s become property of the government he has been avoiding all his life.

When Moon’s father dies, Moon follows his father’s last instructions: to travel to Alaska to find others like themselves. They keep to themselves, their only contact with other human beings an occasional trip to the nearest general store. Annotation: For as long as ten-year-old Moon can remember, he has lived out in the forest in a shelter with his father.

Alabama moon book