Monday, January 3, 2011

#47 - Sounder by William H. Armstrong


1970 Medal Winner
"It was like a horrible nightmare...The boy's father taken away by the sheriff...Sounder racing after them, hit by a shotgun blast...The boy has to save Sounder. The beloved dog risked his life for his family. But the boy's mother says Sounder has crawled away to die!"
This book was very sad. A family torn apart by the unjust arrest of their father, poverty, mistreatment, a beloved dog terribly injured and thought to be dead. Not the most uplifting of stories. But, there is an underlying story that has a good ending. The boy (and interestingly, he is never named in the book) longs for education. He desperately wants to learn to read, and is eventually taken under the wing of a kindly school teacher, and his dream is fulfilled.
I know this book has been made into a movie, and I would love to see it. The book was quite brief (only 116 pages), so I am interested to see how the story was expanded. Definitely a classic!

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