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So I’m trying to catch up on reading some classic kids’ literature, and we’ve got a great used bookstore at our local library, so I picked this one up. I should have known what I was in for because it’s about a kid and a dog, but I didn’t listen to my gut.

Anyway, it’s about a West Virginia boy who finds an abused beagle in the woods near his house. It’s quickly determined that the dog belongs to his a-hole neighbor who is trashy and isn’t nice to animals. As in he starves them and kicks them around to keep them “sharp.”

The kid wants the dog and thus ensues a kind of cat and mouse game with the boy lying to everyone, and finally confronting the neighbor and coming to grips with some thorny moral issues that are well-explored in the book. Good character writing, including the bad guy, means you’re dealing with recognizable humans throughout.

That said, the constant specter of animal abuse as the motivator for the story, the constant scenarios playing out in the boy’s mind, the actual scenes of animals being kicked around, illegally killed, etc. made this a very unpleasant book for me. It got repetitive and tiring and depressing and even though the kid gets the dog in the end (yeah, oops…SPOILER ALERT)…the neighbor still has a yard full of abused hunting dogs. So how the hell am I supposed to be happy with that?

I had to get a photo of the cover online. I didn’t even keep it in the house long enough to take a photo of it.

This book is the first in a trilogy. Thanks, but no thanks.