Just David

If you have a soft spot for Eleanor H. Porter's beloved novel Pollyanna, you should definitely add Just David to your reading list. Written just a few years after Porter penned her best-known work, this emotionally resonant and uplifting tale mines many of the same themes, albeit from a starkly different vantage-point. David is a young boy who has lived an extremely sheltered life in the mountains, with just his father and his beloved violin to keep him company. When his father is beset by a grave illness, David is thrust out of his idyllic existence and is forced to grapple with the reality of the outside world. Will this innocent be able to make it through this trying time with his virtue - and his life - intact? Far up on the mountain-side the little shack stood alone in the clearing. It was roughly yet warmly built. Behind it jagged cliffs broke the north wind, and towered gray-white in the sunshine. Before it a tiny expanse of green sloped gently away to a point where the mountain dropped in another sharp descent, wooded with scrubby firs and pines. At the left a footpath led into the cool depths of the forest. But at the right the mountain fell away again and disclosed to view the picture David loved the best of all: the far-reaching valley; the silver pool of the lake with its ribbon of a river flung far out; and above it the grays and greens and purples of the mountains that climbed one upon another's shoulders until the topmost thrust their heads into the wide dome of the sky itself.There was no road, apparently, leading away from the cabin. There was only the footpath that disappeared into the forest. Neither, anywhere, was there a house in sight nearer than the white specks far down in the valley by the river.