The Light in the Forest

I read it in high school, again in college, and still again (twice) as an adult, once aloud to my 3 young daughters over 3 weeks at bedtime. For me, it is the most powerful, frontier-themed American novel out there. 

 I love a novel that educates me and tells me things I am surprised I didn’t know because I should have, in beautifully constructed sentences.

The dialogue carries its characters so naturally that it is as if you are speaking with them yourself at your main room table in your 18th-century frontier home in Pennsylvania.

I remember as a kid enjoying the movie based on the book.

Though fiction, the tale is inspired by the experiences of many whites captured by American Indians and raised among them. In this short, well-paced novel, True Boy, a captive of the Lenape tribe since age four, is forcibly returned to his white family. He soon yearns to return to the freedom he knew with the Lenape.

I was raised on Westerns and developed a fascination with American Indians that this story addresses well. A fine novel about those who are fated to be strangers wherever they go.

The Light in the Forest is a classic beloved by generations of school children and surely reigns as one of the first great Young Adult novels. I read it several times as a child in the 1960s and still recall scenes from the book, which tells the tale of young John Cameron Butler, who was captured at the age of four by the Lenni Lenape Indians and raised as the adopted son of a war chief. Eleven years later an angry and unwilling 15-year-old John is returned to his white family at the end of the French and Indian War.… show more.