Recommended Reading

Katherine A. Ganzel

I first met Katherine on a website called Wattpad, which is a Canada-based website for writers. When I first came upon her profile, we chatted a while and I started reading one of her stories that she was writing on there called The Boy in the Woods.

There is a version on Wattpad started on November 27, 2013, and Katherine published an expanded version on Amazon on September 3, 2018.

After Katherine wrote The Boy in the Woods, she wrote a prequel to the book titled, The Man Behind the Iron Fence, which details one of the characters’ life story growing up, to show you why he is the way he is in The Boy in the Woods. (I will be adding that here once I finish reading it again.)

Margaret Peterson Haddix

I first learned of Margaret Peterson Haddix when I was in middle school, reading her Shadow Children series. I read the first book Among the Hidden, and I was enamored with the series. I was elated that there were four more books in the series!

Hooked on her first book, I couldn’t wait for the second book to come out. I enjoyed being able to be in their world for five books, to see how the world would be if the population had to be strictly controlled. It was interesting to see the perspective of how a world like that would be run.

Rick Riordan

When I was going through school, in sixth grade, my social studies class was on world religions. In some of the class, we talked about the Ancient Egyptians; Ancient Romans; and Ancient Greeks.

That class, those discussions, gave me a lifelong fascination with those three belief systems/cultures. When I heard that there was a book series based on the Greek deities, I was hooked. After reading the series, I wanted more. I was elated to see that this same author had written a series based on the Greek deities (and their Roman counterparts), as well as one based on the Egyptian deities.

Jean Craighead George

1919 – 2012

When I was a young boy, my father told me about one of his favorite books, My Side of the Mountain, which is about a boy who decides to run away from home to live in the mountains. I went to the library to check out the book and loved it!

After reading that book, I found that Jean wrote two more books like this one: On the Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful’s Mountain. On the Far Side of the Mountain is the sequel to My Side of the Mountain and the prequel to Frightful’s Mountain. It tells the story of how Sam’s family comes to live with him on the mountain, but they leave not long after they come up. Sam’s sister, Alice, stays behind and lives with Sam for the remainder of the novel. Sam also finds out that it is illegal to keep a member of an endangered species as a pet, so he must set her free. This leads into the opening of the final book in the trilogy, Frightful’s Mountain.

Frightful’s Mountain details how Frightful, Sam’s former pet falcon, attempts to reintegrate into the wild while still visiting Sam from time to time. In part of the novel, Frightful becomes mates with a male peregrine falcon and becomes the mother to his babies. She has to relearn how to hunt, as all she hunted previously was small game for Sam. She had to acquire a taste for food that peregrine falcon’s normally eat, such as ducks and other birds.

James B. Garfield

When I was a young boy, my father told me about one of his favorite books, Follow My Leader by James B. Garfield. I read it and found inspiration in the character, James, who was blinded in an accident later on in life, so he had to relearn just about everything in life. It showed me that, despite great challenges, people can come out on top and thrive.