The Underneath
My friend Melissa and I have long shared our obsessive love for children's and YA lit, and I'm a big fan of Kidliterate, her site on such. When I wrote to her gushing about my love for a book I finished yesterday, I was excited to get the chance to post my thoughts there. I'm not a reviewer so it's not a review per se, it's just my reaction a few hours after finishing the book. I'm cross-posting it here, so here it is. I hope to post more at Kidliterate in the future because it's about one of my favorite subjects and run by one of my favorite people!
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In light of how much I adored past National Book Award winners True Believer and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian — they rank among the top YA novels I’ve ever read in my life — I decided to take immediate note of this year’s finalists and read all of them.
First up was The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, simply because it was the first one that arrived via interlibrary loan. I started reading it in bed last night and had to force myself to close the book and set it aside, because forty pages in (it’s an extremely fast read), I knew that if I went much farther I wouldn’t be able to stop until reaching the end, and I am a woman who needs her sleep!
On this lovely Sunday morning, I woke up, made coffee, crawled under a blanket, and lay on the couch in my pajamas for several hours finishing this book. And let me just say that it was wonderful. I was moved throughout and cried actual tears on several occasions.
It’s hard to explain what a treasure this book is without giving too much away. I could say that it’s about a dog, some cats, a snake, an alligator, trees, and birds, because it is about all of those things, but it is so much more. I guess if I had to pick one thing this book is about, I would have to say that it is about family. It is how the unlikeliest of creatures can form a family, it is about how families are torn apart, it is about how families betray each other, die for each other, leave each other, lose each other, and find each other.
Even though these ideas are brought to life primarily by animals and other life forms in a swampy forest, they are ultimately ideas about all of us — human beings, certainly, but also the earth we live on and the living things with which we share it.
I am having a really hard time explaining how beautiful this book is. I feel like even the slightest bit about the plot will spoil it too much. I guess I can say that I think you will love this book if you have ever loved a dog or a cat, ever walked through a forest, ever swum in a creek, ever been scared of the meanness of life and the certainty of death, ever lost someone you loved, or ever believed in magic.
When Melissa told me this book is being aimed at children in the 8-12 age range, I was very surprised for multiple reasons. This book is very scary. There are villains, both human and not, that positively exude evil in a very realistic and un-cartoonish way that would have given me nightmares as a child. This book is also very sad. Extremely traumatic events occur that I found almost unbearable to read. For these reasons, I’d like to see this book marketed toward an age group that’s a little older. It can obviously be enjoyed by adults, to which Melissa and I can attest, and I think high schoolers would be more emotionally and mentally equipped to grapple with not only the frightening and heartbreaking aspects but the overall ideas of the book, which are quite profound. Let me make clear that I usually veer in the completely opposite direction of wanting to take books out of children’s hands because they are scary or sad or hard to understand. But I do think that certain books are more appropriate for older readers than younger readers, and this is definitely one of them.
As noted above, in addition to being sometimes terrifying and often quite sad, this book is also very deep. The title refers to the area underneath a house’s porch, but certainly it can be taken a step beyond that — it also signifies a jar hidden underneath a tree and an alligator hidden underneath the currents of a bayou. Perhaps most of all, though, it signifies the depth of life that glimmers beyond our knowing consciousness, the ancient mysteries of the earth that still resonate beneath the surface, and stories hidden underneath the passage of time. How the author pulled all of this off with a tale about a hound dog and some cats is a testament to her obviously great (and previously unknown to me) talent.
After suffering severe reading burnout this fall, which has never really happened to me before but which I attribute to having read 60 graphic novels over the summer, which almost made my brain fall out, this is the first book I have picked up and gotten all the way through in several months. I am so glad this is the book that has brought me back to books and to reading. It utterly captured both my imagination and my heart. I hope you will also find a place for it in yours.
First up was The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, simply because it was the first one that arrived via interlibrary loan. I started reading it in bed last night and had to force myself to close the book and set it aside, because forty pages in (it’s an extremely fast read), I knew that if I went much farther I wouldn’t be able to stop until reaching the end, and I am a woman who needs her sleep!
On this lovely Sunday morning, I woke up, made coffee, crawled under a blanket, and lay on the couch in my pajamas for several hours finishing this book. And let me just say that it was wonderful. I was moved throughout and cried actual tears on several occasions.
It’s hard to explain what a treasure this book is without giving too much away. I could say that it’s about a dog, some cats, a snake, an alligator, trees, and birds, because it is about all of those things, but it is so much more. I guess if I had to pick one thing this book is about, I would have to say that it is about family. It is how the unlikeliest of creatures can form a family, it is about how families are torn apart, it is about how families betray each other, die for each other, leave each other, lose each other, and find each other.
Even though these ideas are brought to life primarily by animals and other life forms in a swampy forest, they are ultimately ideas about all of us — human beings, certainly, but also the earth we live on and the living things with which we share it.
I am having a really hard time explaining how beautiful this book is. I feel like even the slightest bit about the plot will spoil it too much. I guess I can say that I think you will love this book if you have ever loved a dog or a cat, ever walked through a forest, ever swum in a creek, ever been scared of the meanness of life and the certainty of death, ever lost someone you loved, or ever believed in magic.
When Melissa told me this book is being aimed at children in the 8-12 age range, I was very surprised for multiple reasons. This book is very scary. There are villains, both human and not, that positively exude evil in a very realistic and un-cartoonish way that would have given me nightmares as a child. This book is also very sad. Extremely traumatic events occur that I found almost unbearable to read. For these reasons, I’d like to see this book marketed toward an age group that’s a little older. It can obviously be enjoyed by adults, to which Melissa and I can attest, and I think high schoolers would be more emotionally and mentally equipped to grapple with not only the frightening and heartbreaking aspects but the overall ideas of the book, which are quite profound. Let me make clear that I usually veer in the completely opposite direction of wanting to take books out of children’s hands because they are scary or sad or hard to understand. But I do think that certain books are more appropriate for older readers than younger readers, and this is definitely one of them.
As noted above, in addition to being sometimes terrifying and often quite sad, this book is also very deep. The title refers to the area underneath a house’s porch, but certainly it can be taken a step beyond that — it also signifies a jar hidden underneath a tree and an alligator hidden underneath the currents of a bayou. Perhaps most of all, though, it signifies the depth of life that glimmers beyond our knowing consciousness, the ancient mysteries of the earth that still resonate beneath the surface, and stories hidden underneath the passage of time. How the author pulled all of this off with a tale about a hound dog and some cats is a testament to her obviously great (and previously unknown to me) talent.
After suffering severe reading burnout this fall, which has never really happened to me before but which I attribute to having read 60 graphic novels over the summer, which almost made my brain fall out, this is the first book I have picked up and gotten all the way through in several months. I am so glad this is the book that has brought me back to books and to reading. It utterly captured both my imagination and my heart. I hope you will also find a place for it in yours.
Labels: books
posted by eliza @ 5:02 PM
2 Comments:
This post made me wonder, "Hmm, I wonder if Eliza has read 'The Book Thief.' Seems like she might have." A searchable blog is a wonderful thing!
I just read it and was totally enraptured. Single sentences brought me to tears. It was great to read your old posts about it.
I'll have to check out some of your new recommendations!
Eileen -- I know what you mean about being enraptured by The Book Thief. I still cry literally just thinking about. Definitely check out The Underneath! It is stunningly beautiful.
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