Sounder by William H Armstrong

"He ran his fingers back and forth over the broad crown of the head 

of a coon dog named Sounder."

Publisher blurb: Set in the 19th-century American South, this is the story a poor African-American sharecropping family, their faithful dog, Sounder, and the eldest boy's efforts to learn how to read and help his mother to support the family after his father is arrested for stealing a ham. When Sounder chases after the Sheriff's deputies he is shot and he crawls away, seemingly to die. For weeks the boy thinks that he has lost both his father and his dog, but then Sounder comes back, lame and missing an ear. The boy continues to search for his father, until a few years later the father returns home, disabled from a quarry accident. Reunited at last, the father and Sounder go on one final hunting trip together . . .

Sounder was published in 1969 and it won the Newbery Medal but, while I had heard of this book, reading it last week was a new experience for me. You can read a longer plot summary here. 

There is a whole lesson you could using book covers - you can see a good selection at the top of this post. This is also a book to use if you are talking about the power of a short novel. I had lots of readers in my former school library who not only judged a book by its cover but also by its length. For some a long long book was prestigious for others a shorter book meant the reading might be accomplished more quickly but for other, the kids who worried me, a shorter book somehow meant it would not be good or worth reading. If I was book talking Sounder either with a library group or with one reader I think this book could be the one to persuade them that shorter books can be just as terrific as those long tomes.

Here are some text quotes that resonated with me:

"What the boy saw in Sounder would have been totally missed by an outsider. The dog was not much to look at - a mixture of Georgia redbone hound and bulldog. His ears, nose and colour were those of a redbone. The great square jaws and head, his muscular neck and broad chest showed his bulldog blood."

"The boy pressed his head deep into his straw pillow. The pillow was cold, but it felt smooth, and smelled fresh. He had the same feeling he got when he rubbed his face against the sheets that hung on the clothesline every Monday. His mother washed his pillowcase and sheet every week, just like she did for the people who lived in the big house down the road."

"He watched his mother as she patched his father's overalls with a piece of ticking. The combination of faded blue overall cloth and grey-and-white-striped ticked looked odd."

"The loneliness that was always in the cabin, except when his mother was singing or telling a story about the Lord, was heavier than ever now. It made the boy's tongue heavy. It pressed against his eyes and they burned. It rolled against his ears. His head seemed to be squeezed inward, and it hurt."

"The boy was crying now. Not that there was any new or sudden sorrow. There just seemed to be nothing else to fill up the vast lostness of the moment. ... The tears ran down through the cobwebs and dust that covered his face, making little rivulets. ... There was so sign of Sounder's body."

The novel's strength lies in its meticulous portrayal of the boy's internal world as he grapples with the injustice inflicted upon his family. Following his father's arrest and subsequent imprisonment, the boy embarks on a series of lonely journeys, seeking his father in chain gangs across the landscape, his steadfast loyalty mirroring Sounder’s own unwavering devotion. These journeys are not merely physical; they are spiritual odysseys that test the limits of childish optimism and force a premature confrontation with the world's cruelty. Armstrong masterfully uses the natural world – the desolate roads, the changing seasons – as a backdrop that both reflects and amplifies the boy's emotional state, a silent witness to his quiet suffering. Reviewer Insight

Companion books:

Shiloh

The truth as told to Mason Buttle