This is a beautifully written story that tugs at the heartstrings. I recommend it highly for those with a soft spot for dogs. It's what got me to read the book in the first place. It's very sad though, so there's my warning. :)SPOILERS AHEAD AND A LOT OF THEM!A black sharecropper family is poor and hungry. The boy's father and dog go hunting each night, but the hunting is poor so they live off of corn and potatoes. One morning, that changes when they wake up to a ham boiling. The family feasts on it for three days before the county police knock down the door and arrest the father for stealing a smoked ham. Their dog Sounder tries to stop the arrest, but is shot with a shotgun by one of the officers. After this Sounder cannot be found.The boy goes looking, but only finds a trail of blood leading to Sounder's ear. The boy puts it under his pillow and wishes for him to come home. Even though his mother believes Sounder went off to die the boy searches for weeks while undertaking the responsibility of man of the house by helping care for his younger siblings. The family is now living only off of what the mother makes selling walnuts and the boy.One day he visits his father, but is told not to come back to him, and the next morning Sounder shows up wounded. He's taken care of by the boy and his mother. Soon after, the father is convicted and sentenced to hard labor. The boy decides to go find his father and over the years, he keeps searching.One day, after being hurt, the boy meets an old teacher who offers to let the boy live with him while he teaches him to read and write. When the boy asks his mother, she tells him to go and he does. He stays through the winter and helps with the fields.One day while the boy is at home working on chores during the fall, he sees his father walking towards hi. Though the father is wounded, he is home. Sounder and the father are reunited. So, they go hunting one night, but the Sounder returns alone. The boy finds his father dead and soon sees that Sounder had crawled under the porch and died too. Even though it's gloomy and sad, there's a peace now. The family was back together for a time and now the boy could read.
I've been reading a lot of young adult books recently so that I can teach them to my students or simply recommend them as good reading. Sounder is a book that I remember loving as a kid. I actually think it made me cry when I read it in 6th grade (or whenever I did actually read it). The story line is fairly simple, the characters are pretty interesting, and it is set in an interesting historical period. The protagonist is a young black teenager whose family is a sharecropping family. It is a good book to read when discussing Civil Rights or while incorporating minority perspectives into the classroom. The importance of reading and education is also emphasized in the book. The protagonist walks far distances to and from school in order to learn, and his parents are very proud of him for this.However, I was surprised reading this book at how violent it is. There are vivid descriptions of animals getting shot and their flesh ripping off, and there are a few accounts from the perspective of the protagonist as he images violently beating up people. These descriptions are frankly a bit much, and they would go on for several pages. I am not sure as a teacher that I can recommend this book, or how I would teach these parts in the classroom. It’s borderline too much violence. While it does create a more complicated and imperfect, and therefore interesting protagonist, it may be just too much for some students to handle. Funny how you remember things you read as a kid. I remembered loving this story, but I did not remember any of the violent descriptions. Would your average kid skim over the violence and get the message of the story, or would they focus on the violence? I don’t know, but I don’t know that I feel comfortable recommending this story.
What do You think about Sounder (2002)?
I struggled to enjoy this book and its writing style. This really wasn't a boy and dog story, which I had expected, because Sounder never really loved the boy the way he loved the father (no character has a proper name). The time line of the book also made it hard for me to like the story. I found that the first half of the book took about 14 days to go through then the last half of the book seems to spans 2-3 year if not more. This is a good story if you are looking for a book that depicts everything being apart of Gods plan. There are some sad things that happen to Sounder and to the father but it all seems to help the boy become a better person.
—Kalen
I was very pleasantly surprised by this book (not that the story itself strikes a pleasant tone). In many years I would have quickly agreed that this is the best choice for the Newbery Medal, but for 1970, I would actually give the award to John D. Fitzgerald's "More Adventures of the Great Brain". William H. Armstrong writes with quiet sincerity, and a truthfulness in detail that cannot be exceeded. What I liked best of all about this book is that young readers are so often told that no matter how they feel at that moment, everything will be okay eventually, and in the long run their hurt and deprivation will not be remembered by them. William H. Armstrong does not for one second back away from fully presenting in "Sounder" the real horrors that this African-American family living in the mountains must face. He doesn't condescend to put a band-aid on a situation that cannot be fixed, that can never be made right again. In describing with full force the devastating and grotesque injuries suffered by the coon dog Sounder, as well as the unspeakable treatment inflicted upon the boy's father, William H. Armstrong acknowledges not only the unfathomably deep, terribly raw emotions of his characters, but also the similar feelings of his readers that sometimes, things will not be okay; sometimes, irreparably bad things are done that can never be reversed, even if they seem too horrible to bear. The power of this story is breathtakingly, and the writing of it is starkly real.
—Josiah
This was a book that I wanted to like, but it was clear from the start that this was going to be a difficult task. The author's note at the beginning states that Sounder is really a story told to him by "a gray-haired black man who taught [at] the one-room Negro school." While the author remembered much about the old black man and the stories he told, he did not mention his name. I found this strange. This namelessness continued in the novel, as none of the characters, except for the dog, Sounder, have names. We read about "the boy," "the child," "his father," "his mother" and so on. The setting is also unclear--this story about black sharecroppers could have taken place at any time between the end of the Civil War and the 1930s. The author's approach was frustrating and awkward. For example, at one point when "the boy" goes to visit his father in jail, the jailer asks who he wants to see. The character can not and does not answer because the author has not given the characters names. Although the boy's mother has several children, she constantly refers to the main character, "the boy," as "child." Things like this make these characters seem less than human; they wander through this novel aimlessly with no real knowledge of themselves or their surroundings.Mostly, these characters seem to have no deep thoughts, but there was one exception. When "the boy" went to visit his father in jail, he daydreams about violence against whites (the jailer, the deputy) in what I can only describe as a lynching fantasy. This was quite disturbing, as there is no other indication that this simple character is violent. I am glad that I checked this out from the library and did not spend my money buying it. (FYI: Author's name left out on purpose.)
—Yulonda
