When Novella Carpenter (Farm City) was 36, her father went missing. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the threat of losing him helped Novella realize that, if she were ever to get to know him, she might be running out of time, since their relationship had been stuck somewhere between uneasy and estranged for years. Gone Feral charts her journey home.
Her parents' marriage ended when Novella and her sister were five and seven, and their mother moved them from a farm in Idaho to Washington State; Novella didn't see much of her father after that. Now, three decades later, she has a small urban farm in Oakland, Calif., and wants to have a child. In working to become a parent herself, she goes in search of her father, hoping to build the relationship they never had.
He's a regular backwoods curmudgeon, making a meager living by logging and cutting firewood. She hopes they'll go fly-fishing or forage for wild foods. Instead, he rants about the devils that possess the old family farm and exhibits previously unnoticed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (the legacy of service in the Korean War). Novella is disturbed, angered all over again at what she sees as his abandonment, and concerned about the genes she'll pass on to a child, if she ever succeeds in getting pregnant.
Traveling through the country and her own past and pondering the paradoxes of her upbringing teaches Novella about herself, her origins and how to build a future that includes father as well as child. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia