Sterling North · 1963 · coming-of-age

Sterling North's 1963 memoir of one year in Wisconsin, 1918, when he was eleven and raised a baby raccoon. His mother is dead, his brother is in France, his father is away on business more often than not, and a boy with a half-built canoe in the living room brings up a kit called Rascal more or less alone.

1. 1
   Brailsford Junction

   The Edgerton of North's childhood, renamed. He builds a canoe in the front parlour because nobody stops him, keeps a menagerie in the house and yard, and finds a four-month-old raccoon in a hollow tree in May.

2. 2
   Indian Ford

   Fishing the Rock River with a raccoon riding in the bow of the boat, and the year turning through the last summer of the war - the whole book is a calendar, one chapter to a month.

3. 3
   Saint Paul

   Winter with his married sister Theo, and Rascal travelling by train in a crate - the wider world reaching a boy who has spent the book in one county, and the Armistice and the influenza arriving with it.

4. 4
   Lake Koshkonong

   Rascal is grown now and raiding the neighbours' gardens, and the neighbours have said what they will do. Sterling rows him out into the woods on the lake and lets him go, and hears him answer another raccoon and not come back.