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Summary: The Yearling by Katie and Ashley
Review: The Yearling is for anyone who can relate to a tender relationship between a young boy and his pet. The Yearling is a very visual through the detailed description of its characters, setting, and dialouge. The reader is able to picture the story very clearly in their minds because of the way that the author has written this. The characters are brought to life by this and by the way that the author has written the dialect in a southern style. The yearling takes place in the backwoods of Florida with a young boy named Jody, his family, and his tamed fawn, Flag. Jody and his family suffer through many hardships in their life. They are a poor family trying to raise a farm and suffer through the turmoils of being poor. Through these hardships Jody fell in love with his friendship with Flag. This book is one for people who love animals, love to read about youth growing up, or simply enjoy readin of any kind. This book was difficult in some ways because of the way that the dialogue is written. This book is suggested for children in fifth or sixth grade and up.
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Summary: Proof that Children's literature isn't second class
Review: Every time someone refers to Children's literature as a genre less worthwhile than general fiction or Children's authors as second-class writers, I bring up this book. The Yearling was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.The Yearling is a coming of age book set in the hard-scrabble scrub of Florida around the turn of the century. It is filled with the embarrassment and delight felt by a 12-year-old boy named Jody Baxter. One minute, Jody whirls faster and faster, arms held straight from his shoulders like a water-turkey's wings, until he becomes dizzy and drops to the ground, and then the next, he longs to follow his father, mix with men, and learn their ways. The Florida in this story is as much frontier as was the Wild West. This is a Florida unimagined by all those children who visit Orlando. This is a Florida inhabited by panthers that have cubs with blue spots, by bears that walk upright down the road like men, and by whooping cranes that dance cotillions in the marshes. This is a Florida where one's nearest neighbor lives four miles away, and a family has to work constantly to have enough food to survive another winter. Jody and each of his parents face these hardships differently. The story begins on a day when Jody is just a boy, addled with April and dizzy with Spring. He is the youngest and only surviving Baxter child. Jody thrived when one frail baby after another had sickened and died, almost as fast as they came. Jody's mother seems to have given "all she had of love and care and interest to those others." Jody's father is "a bulwark for the boy against the mother's sharpness." "Leave him kick up his heels and run away," the father thinks. "Leave him build his flutter-mills. The day'll come, he'll not even care to." Jody forgets his work and makes mistakes but his father covers for him. The boy's only problem seems to be loneliness, but even that is eased when his parents allow him to keep an orphaned fawn. The fawn and the boy grow up, becoming yearlings together. By the end of one year, Jody has sat up all night at his best friend's wake, been beaten for helping another friend against three bullies, become enemies with his neighbors over their burning an old woman's home, and tried to run away only to realize there is nowhere else he wants to be. He learns love and disappointment, as well as the fallibility of his father. Jody learns that life is "powerful fine, but 'tain't easy." And knowing all this, Jody enters manhood, leaving childhood. However, "A mark was on him from [that first April] day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember." Note on reading level classification:
While this book is listed as a Young Adult Reading Level book, I read the book when I was in the fifth grade and would recommend it to children of that age level or above. While a certain amount of maturity and emotional sophistication is required in order for the reader to fully understand and appreciate the issues raised in the book, my eleven-year-old daughter had no trouble doing so, and in fact, she was deeply moved by the story. Our family read the book aloud to one another during a week's vacation in a log cabin the mountains. It was a wonderful and rare experience to share this book in that remote location with no telephone nor TV to distract us. Reviewed by Linda Murphy
Children's Editor of the Writers Hood
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Summary: A True Classic
Review: This is such a great book! Any author who can make the characters and their relationships so real to the reader like Ms. Rawlings is truly talented. I haven't read a book that made me cry so hard for a long time. My mom read it when she was young, and she had the same feeling. The book is a mix of love and hate, death and life, loss and gain. This is a classic.
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Summary: awesome
Review: I Give it 4 Stars because it started slow but picked up and kept you guessing until the end. It had a moral at the end that was true in every aspect! I read in my seventh grade English class. I suggest if your a teen you would like this book
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Summary: Brilliant
Review: I read half the book wondering where the "Yearling" was. Then I see what a yearling really is. I felt a strange calm all while reading this. It's hard to describe, but I walk away thinking how different I am then I used to be. I kept coming back to read the last page over and over. It seemed slow, almost in real time, but while reading this I got to slow down myself and see how people can make it with nothing unnecessary. What is necessary anyway? How socially dependent I've become from when I could be amused all day by the most pure things. I recommend this deep story, then stop and look around. This story's brilliant if you can imagine creating your life instead of buying it.
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Summary: Where's the Yearling?
Review: A good, interesting book..except the Yearling doesnt enter till the exact middle of the book. Even though there is no yearling, it is still exciting tracking a bear that is killing their livestock. The boy Jody, wants a pet like his friend Forrester, who has all kinds. He is given the responsibility of taking care of a baby dear. As the dear grows older, it causes trouble, and Jody must decide between his parents wishes, and his beloved yearling, Flag. Its similar to Where the Red Fern Grows, a sad story about a lonely boy in the mountains. Except the ending, is not only sad, but a little disapointing and makes you wonder 'what next?' The yearling is definitly not a main character. You'll be pulled toward the end all through the book, which makes the end a dissapointment.
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Summary: Good Use of Symbolism
Review: The symbolism runs deep in this excellent novel. The yearling is not the deer. Indeed not, the yearling is Jody, the boy who becomes a man-- hence the events of the book transpire over the course of one year. And what a year!! Jody begins a certain year of his life as a boy-- lying beside a brook, playing with a straw paddle wheel. He is innocent, tender, naive. He and the fawn become pals, but by the end of the story, the fawn becomes a buck, and Jody becomes a man. Jody kills a part of himself in the end, but the memories of what he had been in the days of his tenderness stay with him. This is the first book that brought tears to my eyes. I cried like a baby when I read it in 7th or 8th grade as a class assignment-- which was a big deal since I was then and am now a rather unemotional male. I learned about the symbolism in college where I minored in English. Along with Castle of Wisdom by an obscure author named Rhett Ellis, The Yearling is one of the two greatest American coming-of-age stories ever written.
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Summary: Growing up on the Frontier
Review: The Yearling is a narrative about twelve-year-old Jody Baxter growing up in the wilderness of Florida in the 1870's. The main theme of the novel is the maturing of Jody from childhood to boyhood through his fawn "Flag". This historical fiction also captures the hand-to-mouth existence of frontier families of this time period. One day Jody's father Penny is bitten by a rattlesnake. To draw out the venom, Penny shoots a doe and uses the liver as a poultice. Jody realizes that the doe had a concealed fawn and later adopts the orphaned deer. Soon the fawn has grown to a yearling and is impossible to keep out of the Baxter's crops. What will happen to the mischievous yearling Flag? I liked this novel because its setting involves nature and the outdoors. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings used excellent figurative language. Similes such as, "He felt as foolish as a bird dog caught chasing field mice," and hyperboles such as, "A 'coon'll bite one more time after he's dead," made the story more vivid. It was easy to empathize with the characters since I am a twelve-year-old boy who loves animals and the outdoors. This book is a four star work. The only reason it does not muster five stars is because the beginning chapters move so slowly. A prodigious work, it is worth finishing.
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Summary: Idiotic
Review: This book portrays the betrayal and killing of a living creature, the deer, as some sad yet noble obligation on the part of the young boy. He kills his friend, the deer, in order to perform a bizarre, voodoo-like healing of his father who has been bitten by a rattlesnake. This not only teaches incomprehensible medical practices to young children, but teaches them to double-cross those who love and trust them as well.
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Summary: could have been great
Review: I don't consider myself politically correct by any stretch of the imagination-i actually lean ever so slightly to the right on issues of race- but i considered this book to be slightly racist in two ways; the way it portrayed the foresters, and the way it portrayed how people reacted to them-it was nieve in the way people down south treated black. The foresters are the neighbors of the main charachter.The forester's are treated like slightly noble bafoons, and the noble white town folks in the book treat them in a way the that is supposodly the way descent white folk are supposed to treat coloreds-in a condescending, patient manner, because coloreds can't help the way they are. the author grew up in the deep south and she takes her stereotypes with her into her book. if it wasn't for this i would have easily given the book five stars. everything else about the book is perfect
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