(At the time of writing, it might have been more innovative, I don’t know.) You definitely feel like you are there, in the Ozarks, and you know this boy and you know what it’s like to be him, and you really know those dogs as well. It’s also a beautifully told story, except for the cliché bit where the narrator steps out of the story for the beginning and end. This book is an onion of a story, with layer after layer of things to read and analyze and talk about. It includes poverty and manslaughter among hunting, family, masculinity, peer relationships, nature, animals, and of course, dog as man’s best friend.

It is serious and sad and tragic and hopeful and tedious and gory and realistic. He would even read it again, and I can say that of exactly three books up until this point. I was not sure he would like it, being only nine and the book being so very heavy, but he loved it. My son, on the other hand, fit very tidily into these categories. I am a woman who does not hunt and has no remarkable affinity for any non-human creatures. This will never be my favorite book, but that’s largely because it has so very much to do with boys and hunting and creatures… and has such moments of amazing sadness. It felt ominous (for reasons you will understand when you read this). When I started reading, though, the basic feeling came back to me, and I was in the Ozarks, hunting coon, even though I still couldn’t remember what would happen. I had read it-finally, as an adult-maybe fifteen years prior, but had basically forgotten the entire thing. I chose it from a third grade reading list, to read out to my son at bedtime.

Where the red fern grows whole book