A quick review of a young adult book, Sounder. I can’t recall if I actually read this growing up or not. I read a lot of the Newbery Award books in my youth, but I got no sense of deja vu as I read this, so perhaps I didn’t.
The story is that of a young black boy, the son of a sharecropper in the south. His family lives in a small shack with him, his parents, two siblings, and Sounder their redbone hound/bulldog mix. The family isn’t doing so well, so our protagonist’s father steals some meat to feed the family. The white sheriff quickly tracks him down by the smell emanating from the family home and drags father off in chains. Sounder chases after and gets shot for the trouble.
Despite the title, the book really isn’t about the dog. He’s missing for the largest part of the book after he’s shot and runs off. The boy searches and searches for him, as he later searches and searches for his imprisoned father.
The setting is what makes the book for me. Want a picture of how bad a sharecropper’s life could be? Read Sounder. Want an idea of how black men were treated in the South? Read Sounder. This isn’t a tale of a lynch mob or even Jim Crow laws. It’s a tale of the effects of run-of-the-mill treatment of blacks by whites under trying economic circumstances. He doesn’t get to go to school. The owner of the fields separates his sharecroppers cabins so they can’t be part of a community. Whites routinely harass blacks. The jailer breaks apart the boys gift to his jailed father.
I do hate the cover of this edition though. The cover pictures a setter or something like that. I don’t know my breeds that well. But I do know that isn’t a redbone hound/bulldog mix. The cover picture overall is just too clean to portray what’s in the story.
A quick editorial note: my free books roundup for tomorrow will be posted late. Normally it will be posted just after midnight, but I’m off to see the new Batman movie so it may come in mid-day.
Title: Sounder
Author: William H. Armstrong
Imprint / publisher: Scholastic
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 116 p.
ISBN-10: 0-590-40212-9
Subject: African Americans — Juvenile fiction
Subject: African Americans — Fiction
Subject: Dogs — Fiction
Subject: Family life — Fiction
Subject: Poverty — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.A73394 So
