Be Not Far from Me

About Be Not Far From Me

Be Not Far From Me is a young adult survival novel by Mindy McGinnis, published in 2020 by Katherine Tegen Books. The novel follows Ashley, a teenage girl who is more at home in the woods than anywhere else. When she goes to the Smokies with a group of friends for a night of hiking and drinking, she catches her boyfriend with another girl. The resulting rage sends her running into the dark woods — and a fall into a ravine leaves her alone, injured, and far from the trail.

Morning reveals the full extent of what has happened. Ashley has nothing: no phone, no supplies, no map. Just the clothes she's wearing and a wound on her foot that begins to show signs of serious infection. The novel follows her attempt to survive in the undisturbed forest of the Appalachians — building shelter, finding water, making increasingly desperate decisions as the infection climbs up her leg and time becomes critical.

Survival Literature and the YA Tradition

Be Not Far From Me has been compared to Gary Paulsen's Hatchet and Cheryl Strayed's Wild, and the comparison is apt in terms of both the physical ordeal and the psychological experience it describes. McGinnis writes Ashley's situation with unflinching specificity: the hunger, the cold, the smell of infection, the rational calculation of impossible choices. There is no rescue helicopter waiting, no convenient coincidence. Ashley has to figure out whether she can make it out on her own terms.

What distinguishes this novel from many survival stories is its protagonist. Ashley is not out of her element — the woods are where she has always felt at home, which means her crisis is not simply that she is lost in a dangerous place but that the wilderness she loved has become genuinely threatening. The novel explores what it means to love something wild and to discover that it does not love you back.

Language, Grit, and the Challenge Record

Be Not Far From Me has been banned or challenged in three Florida school districts: Clay County School District, Escambia County Public Schools, and Santa Rosa County Schools. The challenges are consistent with challenges to other McGinnis titles — the book's language, its frank treatment of physical harm, and its refusal to soften the experience of a teenager in crisis are all factors that critics have raised in similar cases.

McGinnis's survival novels take seriously the idea that young readers deserve access to stories about people in extremity who find out what they are made of. Removing those books from school libraries doesn't make the wilderness safer. It just makes readers less prepared for it.