The whole focus is Frightful and her life as a peregrine falcon in the wild. I like the ingenious ideas, like solving a puzzle and coming up with interesting and unique answers to the problem of surviving on your own in the wild.īut NONE of that is in this book! So I was disappointed that it wasn't like the first books. I loved Sam's survival story, how he built his house, found his food, and built his furniture and made his own clothes. The things I loved about the first two books aren't in this book though. If you are interested in falconry at all, you would LOVE this book! Very informative and dramatic, as Frightful learns to survive in the wild, struggles to find a mate and raise her own chicks, and finds her way back to Sam as a wild bird. This is my least favorite book in the trilogy, because it mainly focuses on the peregrine falcon, Frightful, and Sam is barely in the story at all. It's not the point of the book, but you can't miss it either. You're not browbeat with it, nor do you run into any moral-of-the-story type sentences.
The book accomplishes this in a very subtle way. It's great for a kid to learn that often the right thing to do isn't the easy thing to do or what we want for ourselves. The best thing about this book is how well it illustrates the dilemma of Sam wanting so much to keep his falcon but knowing that in addition to legal issues, he confronts ethical and nature issues.
The afterword explains the background of the story.
Especially interesting in this book are the foreword by Bobby Kennedy Jr. This book has an unusually strong political agenda for children's lit, but I didn't mind so much, being a nature lover myself. The style is very reminiscent of The Underneath. Until then, it's told from the point of view of the animals. It took me awhile longer to get into this one, because no people show up in it till about 60 pages in.
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