Ellinor's Litventures

I don't understand why this book received so many awards. I thought it was so completely unrealistic.
The book is about a boy who runs away from home and decides to live in the woods on his own. Now I have read and enjoyed books of people living in the wilderness. Hatchet by Gary Paulson was one of the best books I read last year. The difference between those two is that in Hatchet the boy is forced to live and survive in the wilderness because of a plane crash. In this book however the boy decides to live and survive in the wilderness. This would be alright if it was just a kid's crazy dream. But the strange and absolutely unrealistic thing is that nobody seems to bother. People know that there is a boy living in the woods but nobody cares about it. The boy's father even comes into the forest to stay with him over Christmas and leaves again afterwards without taking his son home!
In the book it is not said how old the boy is. He could be anything from 10 to 17. If he is 17 I could understand that other people wouldn't care so much about him living alone in the woods. But one should think that his parents would be really worried anyway.
All this bothered me so much that I didn't really care about the rest of the story anymore.