In many ways, Woods Runner is a classic bildungsroman: a story that depicts a person’s coming-of-age, or transition from childhood into adulthood. The novel opens by specifically describing Samuel as “a child of the forest” (3) and noting his age as 13. Though the majority of the narrative takes place over the course of a relatively short time period, Samuel’s shift from the innocence of childhood to the maturity and responsibility of adulthood is more or less complete at the end of their journey.

Samuel’s innocence is first marked in the novel’s discussion of the mysterious (to Samuel) land to their East: civilization. His idealized and romantic idea of the big cities in the US and Europe is one of the things he must overcome on his journey to manhood (9). His musings on this different lifestyle are almost immediately complicated by news of the War for Independence reaching their small settlement. The war reaches them far too soon, and Samuel is thrust into the role of savior and protector. The novel further explains that Samuel, though only 13, “lived on a frontier where even when things were normal, someone his age was thirteen going on thirty.