# The Lost Frontier Handbook Review: Is It Worth $37?
> Honest review of The Lost Frontier Handbook by Suzanne Sherman: frontier medicine, food preservation, water sourcing, and off-grid skills. Is it worth $37?
Canonical: https://www.backyardfreedomlab.com/reviews/lost-frontier-handbook-review/
Published: 2026-07-09
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| Best For | Skip If |
|---|---|
| Preppers wanting one complete survival reference | Advanced survivalists with extensive prior training |
| Homesteaders focused on food preservation + medicine | Urban apartment dwellers with no outdoor space |
| Beginners — no prior experience required | You need zoning/HOA-specific suburban guidance |
What would you do if the grocery stores closed tomorrow — not for a day, but for weeks?
Most people would be scrambling within 72 hours. No stored food. No way to filter water. No idea how to treat an injury without a pharmacy nearby.
That's the exact problem *The Lost Frontier Handbook* is designed to solve. It's a comprehensive guide to the survival and self-reliance skills that kept American frontier families alive for generations — before supermarkets, before antibiotics, before any of the systems we now take for granted.
We analyzed the publisher's chapter list, author background, and guarantee terms. Here's our complete, honest review.
## What Is The Lost Frontier Handbook?
The Lost Frontier Handbook is a digital (and optional physical) guide covering the essential skills of off-grid living, wilderness survival, food preservation, homestead medicine, and water sourcing.
It's aimed at preppers, homesteaders, and anyone who wants to become more self-reliant — without needing prior experience, expensive gear, or a remote rural property.
The guide is available in:
- **Digital edition** — instant download, accessible on any device
- **Physical copy** — printed and shipped to your door
- **Bundle** — both digital and physical together
Price: Currently **$37** (the sales page advertises 72% off a stated $131 regular price) ([The Lost Frontier Handbook](https://www.thelostfrontierhandbook.com/)). All purchases include a **60-day money-back guarantee**: the vendor's refund policy promises a full refund if you are dissatisfied at any time during the first 60 days after purchase ([refund policy](https://www.thelostfrontierhandbook.com/statics/returnsandrefundspolicy.php)).
## About the Author: Suzanne Sherman
Suzanne Sherman isn't a random internet prepper. According to the sales page, she quit her legal work and left Los Angeles for Utah, where she lives off-grid ([The Lost Frontier Handbook](https://www.thelostfrontierhandbook.com/)).
Her own website lists her work in the self-reliance space ([SuzanneCSherman.com](https://www.suzannecsherman.com/)):
- Host of the **Red Hot Chilly Prepper Podcast**
- Host of **The Wasatch Report** podcast
That background matters. Sherman writes from the perspective of someone who has made the move to off-grid life herself.
## What's Inside: Full Content Breakdown
### 1. Medicinal Remedies & Home Healthcare
This is one of the most distinctive sections in the sales materials. According to the sales page, coverage includes:
- How to create disinfectants and homemade painkillers
- Treating wounds, breaks, and burns
- Sore throat and cough remedies
- "Frontier Penicillin" — which the sales page describes as a remedy used for centuries to keep infection away
- Treatments for cold sores, warts, and fungal infections
### 2. Food Preservation & Long-Term Stockpiling
A substantial portion of the handbook covers food — the most critical factor in any long-term survival scenario. Topics include:
- **Meat preservation** — smoking, drying, curing, salting, and dehydrating
- **Canning and pickling** — step-by-step instructions
- **Root cellars and icehouses** — keeping food cold without electricity
- **Companion planting** — growing crops that support each other
- **Wild game** — hunting, trapping, and processing without modern equipment
- **"Forever foods"** — 22 long-lasting foods the sales page calls critical for preppers
- **Food-spoiling dangers to AVOID** in storage
If long-term food storage is your primary interest, this pairs well with our [The Lost SuperFoods review](/reviews/lost-superfoods-review/) — two complementary approaches to never going hungry when supply chains break down. And if you want the maximalist version of the same knowledge-preservation idea, our [Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization review](/reviews/rebuilding-civilization-review/) covers the most ambitious survival manual we've reviewed.
### 3. Off-Grid Living & Water Sourcing
Clean water is the most urgent survival priority. Sherman covers:
- Building a water filtration system from materials in your yard
- The best wild plants to forage
- Raising chickens for eggs and meat
- Where to find free land in the US
- 75 items the sales page says will be worth more than gold in a crisis
- Making household products at home — soaps, glues, and more
### 4. Frontier Skills & Homestead Cooking
- Off-grid cooking methods for when electric and gas stoves are down
- Emergency food preparation with limited ingredients
- Traditional recipes that maximize nutrition with minimal waste
### Bonus Materials (Included Free)
1. **"The 80 Square Feet Medicinal Garden"** — Grow a complete herbal apothecary in a small space ($27 value)
2. **"Surviving an Economic Collapse"** — Co-written with Luis, who survived Argentina's economic crisis firsthand ($27 value)
3. **"Homestead Cooking 101"** — Off-grid recipes and emergency cooking techniques ($27 value)
## Who Is This For?
**Best fit:**
- Preppers and emergency preparedness enthusiasts
- Homesteaders and off-grid living enthusiasts
- Suburban or rural families who want to build resilience
- Anyone new to survival skills — written for beginners despite its depth
- Budget-conscious readers — most techniques need no expensive gear
**Less ideal for:**
- Advanced survivalists with extensive prior training
- Urban apartment dwellers with no outdoor space
## What to Pair With the Handbook
The honest limitation of any skills guide — including this one — is that reading about a skill and being able to do it under pressure are different things. The Lost Frontier Handbook gives you the method; a few inexpensive physical tools and references turn that method into something you can actually execute. None of these are required to get value from the guide, but each closes a gap the handbook itself points you toward.
The handbook explains why canning and pickling work; this supplies the tested recipes, exact quantities, and processing times to do it safely without guessing.
The off-grid cooking material assumes no electric or gas stove — a single durable skillet that works over fire and coals covers a lot of that cooking.
Sherman's water chapter covers DIY filtration from yard materials; a gravity filter is the reliable, tested backstop for turning questionable water into drinking water today.
The "80 Square Feet Medicinal Garden" bonus is only useful if you can plant it — open-pollinated heirloom seeds let you grow, save, and replant the garden it describes.
## How to Get the Most From the Handbook
A guide this broad can be paralyzing if you try to absorb all of it at once. The practical approach is to treat it as a reference you work through slowly rather than a book you read once.
Start with the two chapters that carry the most weight for the least effort: homestead medicine and water sourcing. Those are the skills with the shortest path from reading to real-world payoff, and they are the areas where most households are genuinely unprepared. Pick one technique — say, the natural disinfectant recipe or a single water-filtration method — and actually practice it before moving on.
From there, work at roughly one skill a month. Preserve a small batch of food using the smoking or curing instructions. Grow a corner of the medicinal garden from the bonus guide. Build the simple yard-material water filter and test its output. The value of the handbook compounds when the skills leave the page — a guide full of techniques you have never tried is just expensive reassurance.
Keep expectations calibrated to your situation. If you have a backyard or a patch of land, most of the content is directly actionable. If you are in an apartment, the medicine, food-storage, and water-treatment sections still apply, but the livestock, land-sourcing, and larger homestead chapters will sit unused until your circumstances change. That is not a flaw in the guide — it is a reason to be honest with yourself about which half you are actually buying.
## Pros and Cons
## Price, Guarantee, and How Buying Works
At the time of writing, the digital edition costs **$37**. Physical and bundle options are also available at additional cost. Three bonus guides come with every purchase.
The **60-day money-back guarantee** is written into the vendor's refund policy: if you're dissatisfied at any time during the first 60 days after purchase, you can ask for a full refund ([refund policy](https://www.thelostfrontierhandbook.com/statics/returnsandrefundspolicy.php)). If the guide isn't what you expected, contact the vendor within 60 days.
**Note:** The sales page displays a "72% off" offer from a stated regular price of $131. These are standard sales-funnel tactics. Buy on the merits or not at all; don't let a countdown clock decide for you.
## Best Alternatives
If The Lost Frontier Handbook isn't the right fit:
| Alternative | Best For | Price |
|---|---|---|
| [The Lost SuperFoods](/reviews/lost-superfoods-review/) | 126+ forgotten survival foods and storage hacks, more food-focused | See site |
| [The Self-Sufficient Backyard](/reviews/self-sufficient-backyard-review/) | Off-grid authors Ron and Johanna Melchiore, homestead projects for land-owners | See site |
| [Backyard Liberty](/reviews/backyard-liberty-review/) | Compact backyard food system, small patio or garage | ~$39 ([vendor](https://www.backyardliberty.org/pf/vsl/)) |
## Final Verdict
The Lost Frontier Handbook earns its 8.8. Suzanne Sherman brings the perspective of someone who made the move off-grid herself, and the combination of frontier medicine, food preservation, and off-grid water skills in a single beginner-friendly guide is rare. The natural remedies coverage, including "Frontier Penicillin," is a distinctive part of the package. Dock a point for the over-hyped sales funnel and the limited utility for pure city dwellers. For anyone with even a backyard or a patch of land, and a serious interest in building resilience, this is one of the stronger-value guides in the category — and the 60-day refund makes the downside close to zero.