Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild - Softcover

San Francisco Chronicle
"[R]iveting... a mission to reconcile the romantic image she has conjured of her absent father with the troubled man he truly is... Author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and co-author of The Essential Urban Farmer, Carpenter captures her scrappy, resourceful life with vivid detail and candor. We see her riding her bike in a fake-fur hat to find leafy branches for her Nigerian Dwarf goats to eat; we see the sticky bee frames piled in the corner of her living room; we see her and her partner Bill wrestle with their longing to bring a child into their unconventional life. Carpenter brings the reader so close, we can smell the chevre-like scent of her goat Milky Way's head, can feel the hot knife she presses to her skin after a bad breakup in her younger years... Carpenter reminds us that sometimes the self is the thorniest wilderness of all."

Booklist
"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."

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love
"I'm so glad Novella Carpenter has written this book. It's gratifying to see a woman take on the question that has pulled at male authors for so long -- namely, 'What am I to make of my old man?' In her efforts to answer that question (and to reconsider and reconcile her own complicated family history) Carpenter goes on nothing less than a vision quest, in search of answers from a particularly reticent and strange father. The resulting journey is both brave and honest. There is much to be learned here for all daughters -- about acceptance, about redemption, about the distances we must go at times to find our own deepest familial truths."

Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones
"Novella Carpenter couldn't be more fun to hang out with on the page. Gone Feral is full of scruffiness and wit, melancholy and compassion. It's an extraordinary portrait of a father and daughter doing their best to be family."

Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness and In the Kingdom of Men
"Novella Carpenter is a delightful storyteller, and Gone Feral reads like a fable, full of wild and unknown things, including a trickster father, whose mountain man fantasies and failed dreams lead the author on her own sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking journey of discovery."

NOVELLA CARPENTER is the author of the bestselling Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and is the coauthor of The Essential Urban Farmer. She lives and farms in Oakland, California, with her partner, Billy, and their daughter, Francis.

WWW.NOVELLACARPENTER.NET