Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"One night the howlin' dog sings a lullaby
Drift you onto peaceful memories
One night the howlin' dog cries out lonely life
Break you like the light between the trees"
-- Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, "This Eye"

"But when she got to the place where the hound sang, she knew that something was wrong.
"She stopped.
"In front of her sat a shabby frame house with peeling paint, a house that slumped on one side as if it were sinking into the red dirt. The windows were cracked and grimy. There was a rusted pickup truck parked next to it, a dark puddle of thick oil pooled beneath its undercarriage. She sniffed the air. It was wrong, this place. The air was heavy with the scent of old bones, of fish and dried skins, skins that hung from the porch like a ragged curtain. Wrong was everywhere.
"She should turn around, she should go away, she should not look back. She swallowed. Perhaps she had taken the wrong path? What path should she take? All the paths were the same. She felt her kittens stir. It surely wouldn't be safe to stay here in this shabby place.
"She was about to turn around, when there it was again -- the song, those silver notes, the ones that settled just beneath her skin. Her kittens stirred again, as if they, too, could hear the beckoning song. She stepped closer to the unkempt house, stepped into the overgrown yard. She cocked her ears and let the notes lead her, pull her around the corner. There they were, those bluesy notes."

After being abandoned by her former owners in East Texas bayou country, and having been drawn through the woods by the lonely song of the chained-up, often-unfed hound dog named Ranger, a pregnant calico cat arrives at the isolated home of Ranger's bitter, violent, and disfigured owner, Gar Face. There, in the the dark space beneath the slumping house -- the Underneath -- the calico cat gives birth to her son Puck and her daughter Sabine. The two young kittens are repeatedly warned by their mother and Ranger about the danger posed by the hard-drinking, rifle-wielding Gar Face and that to be safe they must always remain in the Underneath.

Tragedy strikes when Puck's curiosity causes him to not heed those warnings. THE UNDERNEATH is in large part the story of Puck's subsequent journey.

Meanwhile:

"She has been trapped for a thousand years. But she is older than that, much older. Lamia. She is cousin to the mermaids, the ondines, the great sealfolk known as selkies, perhaps the last of her kind."

THE UNDERNEATH is also the story of another mother, Grandmother Moccasin, and what befell her a thousand years earlier in the days when a native people named the Caddo inhabited the area along the creek that has since come to be called the Little Sorrowful:

"And all around, the watchful trees, the oldest ones, shimmered. They knew that Grandmother Moccasin, when she awoke, would not be happy. The trees knew, but they also recognized the moment for what it was: a love so strong that there was no going back for either one. So for just a little while, the soughing trees used their own ancient magic to stir up the Zephyrs of Sleep. To keep all the others in the forest a-snoozing until Hawk Man and Night Song, in their brand-new skins, had slipped away. For trees, who see so much sorrow, so much anger, so much desperation, know love for the rare wonder of it, so they are champions of it and will do whatever they can to help it along its way."

In this perfectly crafted, suspenseful tale filled with myth and magic, pain and love, and the beauty and the perilousness of bayou country, those ever-watchful trees include a grand old, ailing-yet-proud loblolly pine that will provide a bridge across a thousand years of story and across the Little Sorrowful itself.

"Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go"
-- Neil Young, "Birds"

The story is perfectly complemented by David Small's beautiful pencil illustrations. (My favorite is definitely his depiction of the scene when, "Suddenly the sky filled up with...a million different birds, calling in their million different voices.")

Without question, Kathi Appelt's THE UNDERNEATH is the finest animal story for children I have read in years. A suspenseful page-turner featuring an incredibly endearing hound dog, I cannot wait to hunt down a young audience with whom I can share it.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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