Gone Feral

July 7, 2014
Carpenter's memoir begins with a phone call. Her father, who has been absent most of her life, had gone missing. Concurrently, as Carpenter confronts her urge to begin a family, the desire to build a stronger bond with her father takes shape. "Would he even care? I wasn't sure, but I knew before I tried to start a family of my own, I needed to try to make things right with Dad." Carpenter's excavation into her parent's story, begins with their romance in Mexico followed by their early-married life on a remote Idaho homestead. After her parent's 1976 divorce, her father's wish for freedom trumped his desire to parent. Close examination of her parent's life together, uncovers links between their living off the land ethos and her urban farming pursuits chronicled in her first book. (Farm City) "The closer I looked at my parents' past, the better I was able to see the parallels in my own life." Carpenter's engaging blend of memories, intimate descriptions of uncomfortable visits with her father, conversations with her family friends and old photographs, provides a solid foundation for her narrative. Carpenter's candid appraisal of her metamorphosis from daughter to mother, coupled with a probing examination of the boundaries of parental love will be applauded by both fans and those unfamiliar with her work.

May 15, 2014
Like the offspring of so many of the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s, Carpenter, herself an urban farmer (Farm City, 2009), and her sister received only minimal parental attention, which was further diminished when their parents split over the strain of free love and a lax work ethic. When her mother took the girls to Washington, leaving their father behind on a sprawling Idaho homestead, they never thought he would disappear from their lives. The phone call that comes nearly 30 years later saying that George, their now 73-year-old father, really has gone missing motivates Carpenter to try to find the man, literally and figuratively, whom her father became. Spurred on by a desire to raise a family of her own and decipher the genetic code for either survival or destruction that she might be passing on, Carpenter performs a wild pas de deux with the cantankerous George, approaching him as one would a wild animal with no trust in humanity. Carpenter chronicles her daring quest for understanding and familial continuity in this sincere and remarkably uninhibited memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)