2010 Patrick D. Smith Award Winner

This novel is strong on action and description. Reading it is like watching a kaleidoscope of places and things. It provides a trip back to the 1850's Florida, a time when things were so different from today. It is an interesting journey.

More than eighty years before Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published The Yearling, Cyrus Parkhurst Condit wrote this coming-of-age novel about a teenage boy in Florida who learns to hunt, builds a fence, and takes a fawn as a pet. Undiscovered and unpublished until now, this engaging story is historically significant as one of the first Florida novels ever written. Fascinating historical and literary context is provided by the editors.