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A poignant and affectionate memoir about a time when being young, free, and largely unsupervised was the norm, before the digital age ushered in a world of algorithms and overparenting.
Set in 1976, the bicentennial year, Free Range Girl chronicles the year 12-year-old Meghan spent on a homestead in rural Maine with her father, who built the house by hand. A proponent of the idealistic “back to the land” movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Meghan’s father hoped that renouncing modern conveniences would usher in a life of greater simplicity, authenticity, and independence. Many locals were skeptical of Meghan's father and his cohort —they were regarded as “From Away.” Nevertheless, without electricity or indoor plumbing, Meghan found herself enduring—and often enjoying—a penniless and largely unsupervised childhood, in which, among other things, she blew her eyebrows off trying to cook with gas, discovered a severed pig’s head in a wheelbarrow, learned to ride enormous horses with neither saddle nor helmet, and witnessed her father use a handgun to execute a misbehaving alarm clock. Meghan faces challenges beyond these — family break‑ups, a serious accident that sends her to the hospital, and her attempts to bond with new school friends — yet she thrives.
This is a powerful and luminous look back at a childhood that could likely never happen again, providing a striking counterpoint to the screen-saturated and tightly managed childhoods of today.
Praise for Meghan Cox Gurdon's The Enchanted Hour:
“Parents and grandparents shouldn’t miss The Enchanted Hour.” — James Patterson, international bestselling author
“Before there was helicopter parenting, before there was gentle parenting, there was the wild dangerous freedom of childhood in the 1970s. Meghan Gurdon’s memoir evokes that lost world with the honesty and freshness of the child she was - and the wry humor of an adult still surprised she survived to tell the tale.”
“Are you craving a better path to the good life than safety and comfort? Free Range Girl is the delightful story of Megan Cox Gurdon’s countercultural off-the-grid childhood in rural Maine. This memoir is as inspirational as it is entertaining.”
“A triumph of reconstructive memory. All the small details of daily life, of the harrowing adventures of unsupervised childhood: the horseback accidents, the exploding stove, the sledding with ridiculously dangerous equipment. The book not only captures collectively the vanished world of the past, but the individually vanished world each of our own early lives, that feel as if we might almost - but never can quite - grasp them again.”
“What difference does a year make in the life of a child? Luckily, we have a writer as talented and engaging as Meghan Cox Gurdon to tell us. Free Range Girl tells the story of 12-year-old Gurdon’s adventures in the analog wilderness, living with her father in a rural cabin in Maine that he built by hand. In lyrical prose, Gurdon describes with humor and empathy the adventures, mishaps, surprises, and joys of that year. What a gift it is to have this intrepid, curious girl as our guide, and to experience alongside her the remarkable, bygone wonders of a free range childhood.”
“Free Range Girl brings back the tender, half-grasped reality of being young with bright photographic clarity. It is also a refreshing departure from the familiar misery memoir. The focus isn’t trauma and dysfunction, but a child’s remarkable ability to find joy and meaning in the chaos of daily life.”