Books/Hideout
Novel · Young readers
Hideout
Sam finds a boy living alone in an abandoned cabin deep in the swamp, and starts telling the kind of small lies that get large.
The story
Twelve-year-old Sam has been given a fishing boat by his father, but he hates fishing. Instead he uses the boat to disappear for hours at a time, exploring the forbidden swampy surroundings of his Gulf Shore home.
Then he discovers a boy named Davey, mysteriously alone, repairing an abandoned cabin in the deep woods. Not fooled by the boy’s evasive explanation as to why he is on his own, Sam becomes entangled in his own efforts to help Davey.
But this leads him to telling small lies that only get bigger as the danger increases for both boys, and hidden truths become harder to reveal.
Details
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Audience
- Ages 10 and up
- ISBN
- 9780374304829
- Setting
- The Alabama Gulf Coast and the swamp behind it
Why this one
A cabin in the woods, built by somebody.
Watt built a cabin out of driftwood on a rise of ground deep in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and spent twenty years of weekends going back to it. Anyone who has done that has also had the other experience: coming around a bend and finding somebody else’s camp, and having to decide what you saw and who you tell.
Hideout is that decision, handed to a twelve-year-old who is not equipped to make it and makes it anyway.
The nonfiction version
The actual cabin, the actual neighbors, and twenty years of learning how the delta works.
Among the Swamp People →Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
