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Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Frightful's Mountain
Series:
My Side of the Mountain #3
Author: Jean
George
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre:
Middle Grade
Pages: 146
Words: 55.5K
From Bookrags.com
In
“Frightful’s Mountain”, Frightful, the female peregrine falcon
formerly a pet of Sam Gribley, attempts to reintegrate into the wild,
while maintaining her ties with Sam and Bitter Mountain. The novel
begins where “On the Far Side of the Mountain” ends: Sam, knowing
that it is illegal for him to keep a pet peregrine falcon, and
wanting Frightful to have a good and full life in the wild, refuses
to call Frightful to him when he sees her flying around in the sky.
Frightful then befriends and becomes the mate of Chup, a male
peregrine falcon, and becomes the adoptive mother to Chup’s
motherless children, Drum, Lady, and Duchess. It is a crash course
for Frightful, who must not only learn to eat new kinds of food
–primarily ducks and other birds, whereas she had been trained to
hunt small game by Sam –but to care for wild baby falcons.
As
November comes on, and all the falcons and other birds migrate south,
Frightful stays on, determined to find her old mountain, and her old
home. She is electrocuted on a utility pole, nearly killed, by nursed
back to health by falconers Jon and Susan Wood, and is released in
the spring. Frightful seeks out Bitter Mountain, and finds Sam, where
she spends some time with him and hunts. She then decides to nest on
the bridge in the town of Delhi. She attracts a mate named 426, a
bird tagged and tracked by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and
she lays three eggs. Yet, as this happens, a construction crew moves
onto the bridge to begin work. Sam sneaks up to the bridge every day,
and spends hours keeping Frightful calm, so she can incubate her
eggs. Leon Longbridge, the local conservation officer, and a group of
school kids, including Molly and Jose, try to get the construction to
cease until Frightful’s babies hatch, but the crew cannot stop work
without orders from the state government. The construction
crewmembers feel bad they cannot stop work, but they have no choice
in the matter. Attempts to move Frightful and her eggs fail, so when
it comes time to paint the bridge, the crews decide they will paint
the section of the bridge with Frightful on it, last. Finally,
Frightful’s babies hatch.
One
morning, two agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service show up
to remove two of the baby falcons. In reality, they are Bate and
Skri, two poachers arrested in “On the Far Side of the Mountain”,
and back in the business of illegal selling of falcons. Sam helps
track them down, and the police arrest Bate and Skri as they hide out
in the old summer lodge of nature writer John Burroughs. From there,
Frightful’s two babies will be raised and hacked into the wild.
Meanwhile, Frightful raises her daughter, Oski, on her own on Bitter
Mountain with Sam. Ultimately, they all fly south for the winter.
When Frightful returns, she visits Sam as usual, but decides to nest
in town, rather than on Bitter Mountain. Oski, however, decides that
Sam’s mountain is a perfect place to nest.
Ok, here we go. There was a forward. I skipped it until I'd finished
the book and then I went back and read it. It was written by Bob
Kennedy Jr. While I can't say anything about JFK, I can say that I've
seen nothing good from his living relatives throughout the decades so
a Kennedy's name in the forward was not a good thing or an added
draw. Especially when he goes off about how George inspired him to
become a lawyer. Great, just what our country needs, more lawyers.
Thanks a lot Jean George.
Secondly, and more to the point, this wasn't much of a novel, middle
grade or otherwise. It was much more of a National Geographic
eco-documentary about birds. Sure, Sam is mentioned and some stupid
kids and even dumber adults act emotionally and irrationally in
response to “evil” electric companies and state governments but
that's not enough to make a real story out of.
Thirdly, but in conjunction with the above, this was written 40 years
later and shows that George was more concerned with her message than
actually telling a story. It was a big disappointment to see how
George treated her human characters and how she leveraged the
popularity of her first book to sell this one.
Overall, the first book should have been left alone as a standalone.
It was excellent and fun and told a wonderful story. Each successive
book has gone down hill and I suspect the two books after this one to
be even worse. I certainly won't be finding out.
Someone asked me why I was reading these books when I reviewed the
second book and it basically comes down to trying to read some middle
grade so I don't take everything so seriously. To replace this series
I'll be adding most of Roald Dahl's children's books to the rotation.
At least that I know will be light and funny.
★✬☆☆☆
