Coming on October 20, 2026: Free Range Girl

- Pre Order Now -

Coming on October 20, 2026: Free Range Girl - Pre Order Now -

“Are you craving a better path to the good life than safety and comfort? Free Range Girl is the delightful story of Meghan Cox Gurdon’s countercultural off-the-grid childhood in rural Maine. This memoir is as inspirational as it is entertaining.”

— ARTHUR C. BROOKS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Meaning of Your Life

Coming Soon!

A powerful and luminous look back at a childhood that could likely never happen again, providing a striking counterpoint to the screen-saturated and tightly managed childhoods today.

Set in 1976, the bicentennial year, Free Range Girl chronicles the year 12-year-old Meghan spent on a homestead in rural Maine with her father, who built the house by hand. A proponent of the idealistic “back to the land” movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Meghan’s father hoped that renouncing modern conveniences would usher in a life of greater simplicity, authenticity, and independence. Read more…

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More From Meghan Cox Gurdon

The Enchanted Hour

Imagine an elixir so strong that a daily dose makes your family smarter, happier, healthier, more successful, and more closely attached. Now imagine that you can have it without spending a dime.

It all starts with a story, a voice, and a place to sit . . .

From a beloved Wall Street Journal columnist comes a book that will transform your understanding of reading aloud. Grounded in the latest brain science and behavioral research, and drawing widely from life and literature, The Enchanted Hour reveals the stunning advantages that await people of every age and background when they partake of this ancient practice.

Meghan Cox Gurdon shows how reading out loud offers a refreshing, fast-working antidote to the fractured attention spans, atomized families, and unfulfilling distractions of the tech era. From a thrilling look at what happens in a toddler’s brain when a grownup reads a story, to the way shared books are keeping far-flung military families connected; from the imaginative transport of classic novels, to the rejuvenating late-life consolations of the spoken word: the evidence is clear and the benefits irrefutable.

Taking us into hospitals, homes, bookstores, and schools, Gurdon blends cutting-edge science with funny, touching stories of real families -- including her own -- in a compelling testament to the power of what Charles Dickens called the “spoken syllable.”

Lively and authoritative, with practical tips and reading recommendations, The Enchanted Hour will inspire readers to share this invaluable, life-altering tradition with the people they love most—and perhaps rediscover an enchanted slice of their own childhoods in the process.

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Reviews & Accolades

“Free Range Girl brings back the tender, half-grasped reality of being young with bright, photographic clarity. It is also a refreshing departure from the familiar misery memoir. The focus isn’t trauma and dysfunction, but a child’s remarkable ability to find joy and meaning in the chaos of daily life.”

— CHRISTINE HOFF SOMMERS, author of One Nation Under Therapy

“What difference does a year make in the life of a child? Luckily, we have a writer as talented and engaging as Meghan Cox Gurdon to tell us.... Gurdon describes with humor and empathy the adventures, mishaps, surprises, and joys of that year. What a gift it is to have this intrepid, curious girl as our guide, and to experience alongside her the remarkable, bygone wonders of a free range childhood.”

— CHRISTINE ROSEN, author of The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World

“Are you craving a better path to the good life than safety and comfort? Free Range Girl is the delightful story of Meghan Cox Gurdon’s countercultural off-the-grid childhood in rural Maine. This memoir is as inspirational as it is entertaining.”

— ARTHUR C. BROOKS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Meaning of Your Life

“A triumph of reconstructive memory.... The book not only captures collectively the vanished world of the past, but the individually vanished worlds [of] each of our own early lives that feel as if we might almost––but never can quite––grasp them again.”

— DANIELLE CRITTENDEN, author of Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable

“Before there was helicopter parenting, before there was gentle parenting, there was the wild dangerous freedom of childhood in the 1970s. Meghan Gurdon’s memoir evokes that lost world with the honesty and freshness of the child she was––and the wry humor of an adult still surprised she survived to tell the tale.”

— DAVID FRUM, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse

“Don’t pick up this bewitching book!
It’s so enchanting you won’t be able to put it down.”

— Mem Fox, author of "Reading Magic"

“This book shines a light on the incredible power of reading aloud for everyone – not just children. . . . A joyous book that’ll have you scrambling to the library.”

— Yours Magazine, UK

“Meghan Gurdon has given today’s parents much needed wisdom to raise attentive and curious children in the Age of Distraction. I hope her book finds a huge audience.”

— Rosemary Wells, author of the Max & Ruby series

“The Enchanted Hour enthralled and inspired me in equal measure.... [It’s] the most charming, gentle encouragement to step away from your phone, and into the embrace of your family’s most vivid imaginations.”

— Sara Ivens, author of "Forest Therapy"

“Gurdon convincingly describes the importance and delight of sharing books with loved ones. . . . For anybody interested in reading, especially parents, teachers, caregivers, and librarians, this inspirational work proclaims its joys and rewards.”

— Library Journal (starred)

“Parents and grandparents shouldn’t miss The Enchanted Hour... We all need to heed this delightful book’s wise advice. Please read to your kids. It’s not the school’s job to get our kids reading, it’s our job – and it’s a wonderful, magical act of love and caring.”

— James Patterson, International Bestselling Author

“Best Nonfiction, Author Award:
Meghan Cox Gurdon”

— 2019 Books by the Banks festival, cincinnati

“This wonderful audiobook is a fully enjoyable listen. . . . [Gurdon’s] pacing is excellent, and her ability to maintain listener attention is impressive. . . .
An important and engaging audiobook.”

— AudioFile Magazine

About Meghan

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s “Free Expression” newsletter and a weekly contributor to the WSJ books pages. At the Journal, she writes about biographies, histories, audiobooks, fiction, technology and social science, with a lively eye to the quirks of domestic life. She brings to her work a humane sensibility grounded in traditional respect for language and literature. Previously, over two decades as the Journal’s children’s book critic, she commented on cultural trends in books for young people while seeking to highlight works of lasting value.

Meghan’s forthcoming memoir “Free Range Girl,” publishing October 20th, tells of her experiences in the mid-1970s going “back to the land” in rural Maine with her father. An ardent and authoritative advocate of reading aloud – with five children, she’s had plenty of experience – Meghan is also the author of “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction” (2019), an award-winning work of nonfiction soon to be available in seven languages.

Meghan and her husband, the English journalist Hugo Gurdon, live in Maine.

Contact

For rights enquiries, please contact:
Stephen Barbara
Inkwell Management
212-922-3500
stephen@inkwellmanagement.com

For speeches and appearances, please contact:
Francis Hoch
Chartwell Speakers
francis@chartwellspeakers.com

Audiobook users, kindly use this contact form to request a copy of the enhancement PDF to accompany your audiobook (scroll down for the submit button). Happy listening!