Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Others with one-star reviews already said what I feel about this book, so I will add what hasn’t been said yet. The author was 69 when she published this first fiction book and has a PhD in animal behavior. This should have told me everything about this book, but I bought into the great reviews and decided to try. This book is horrible. It felt like a story your drunken great aunt would tell and the story got weirder and more senseless as the story developed. I am not sure what point the author was trying to make, but I think was something about how a person can live off the land in a modern world and learn about love and human interactions from mating habits of birds and insects. Or maybe she was trying to make an opposite argument... whatever. Supposedly, one can learn to read at 14 with a minimal human interaction between 6 and 14 and proceed to reading and understanding books by Einstein just a few years later and even publish her own books. This was the spot in the book where I almost stopped reading, but proceeded just to see how stupid the rest of the book is. And even though you have no documents or ID and the county has no records of you (as was stated in early pages), you can still cash a bank check or borrow books from a library. Oh, and when you call a handy man, he can quickly outfit your house with electricity, hot water and gas, even though the house is clearly away from any kind of utilities. Some may say technicalities and details are not the point of this book. Then what is? Of course, there are many pages devoted to sexual desires and confusion of teens. Great topic, but handled with a tact of a bear. The author doesn't stop comparing these feelings to animals mating with an obvious cliche story about praying mantis. She also finds examples in nature when mothers abandon their babies as an excuse to what the main character's mother did. Really? I checked, and it appears that the author doesn't have her own children - that is a more probable explanation to this story line. Oh, one more thing: all my life I thought it's not good for seagulls to eat scraps of human food like bread. Well, a PhD zoologist tells you it's all good, as Kya did that everyday without any ill effects. Good to know (sarcasm). And finally, the murder. You can get away with a per-meditated murder, you know, and that is morally justifiable if you have good reasons. You can read online how the author's husband allegedly got away with real murder while in Africa back then, so what a coincidence, huh?... I can start again with technicalities as to where did Kya get the wigs and stuff to hide on the bus, but why bother. That is a story told by a drunken aunt, remember?