Product Description

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.

A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this cat, this feline, this creature he is supposed to hate. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath...as long as they stay in the Underneath.

Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten's one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning. For everyone who loves Sounder, Shiloh, and The Yearling, for everyone who loves the haunting beauty of writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, Kathi Appelt spins a harrowing yet keenly sweet tale about the power of love -- and its opposite, hate -- the fragility of happiness and the importance of making good on your promises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18464 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416950585
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From School Library Journal
Grade 4–8—Appelt brings Southern Gothic to the middle grade set. Three separate but eventually entwined stories are told piecemeal. There is the tale of an abandoned, pregnant calico cat who finds shelter and friendship with the bloodhound, Ranger. He is the abused and neglected pet of Gar Face, a broken-jawed recluse who lives in the Texas bayou, where he fled 25 years previously to escape an abusive father. And finally there is the story of Grandmother Moccasin, a shape-shifting water snake who has lain dormant in a jar for a thousand years, buried beneath a loblolly pine tree. The threads are brought together when Puck, one of the newborn kittens, breaks the rule of straying from the safety of The Underneath, the sliver of space beneath Gar Face's porch where Ranger is chained and the cats live. The pace of this book is meandering, and there is a clear effort by the dominant third-person narrator to create a lyrical, ancient tone. However, the constant shift of focus from one story line to the next is distracting and often leads to lost threads. Small's black-and-white illustrations add a certain languid moodiness to the text. Themes of betrayal, hope, and love are reflected in the three stories, but this is a leisurely, often discouraging journey to what is ultimately an appropriate ending.—Kara Schaff Dean, Walpole Public Library, MA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Appelt’s impressive novel (her first) entails animals in crisis—a topic of enduring popularity. But the author, whose path from picture books to fantasy is discussed in the Story behind the Story, breathes new life into the sentient-animals premise, introducing strong currents of magic realism into a tale as rich and complex as “the gumbo-like waters of the bayous.” Chained and starved by cruel trapper Gar Face, lonely hound Ranger finds companions in a stray cat and her two kittens. When Mother Cat falls victim to Gar Face’s abuse, the surviving animals, especially sensitive kitten Puck, struggle to keep their makeshift family together. The animals’ caring, generous bonds juxtapose with the smothering love of an ancient shape-shifter in a moving parallel story. Joining Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting as a rare example of youth fantasy with strong American underpinnings, Appelt’s novel folds in specific traditions of the Caddo peoples of east Texas, and casts the bayous as a kind of enchanted forest laden with spirits and benign, organic presences. Some readers may struggle with Appelt’s repeated phrases and poetic fragments, and wish the connections and conflicts in the story came to a faster boil. But most children will be pulled forward by the vulnerable pets’ survival adventure and by Small’s occasional, down-to-earth drawings, created with fluid lines that are a perfect match for the book’s saturated setting and Appelt’s ebbing, flowing lyricism. Grades 4-8. --Jennifer Mattson

Review
"A mysterious and magical story; poetic yet loaded with suspense."-- Louis Sachar, Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes

"The Underneath is as enchanting as a hummingbird, as magical as the clouds." -- Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal-winning author of Kira-Kira

"Rarely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me why I wanted to be a writer -- to make of life something beautiful, something enduring. The Underneath is a book of ancient themes -- love and loss and betrayal and redemption -- woven together in language both timeless and spellbinding. A classic."-- Alison McGhee, author of the New York Times bestselling Someday

"Kathi Appelt's novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung."-- Ashley Bryan, Hans Christian Anderson Award Nominee and Three-Time Coretta Scott King Award Medalist

Customer Reviews

Dark and beautiful
I review lots of books. Oodles of caboodles of books. And a lot of the time my thoughts can basically be boiled down to very simple sentences. "Me like book. Book good." or conversely "Me no like book. Book bad." It takes a very special story to knock me out of this frame of mind. When you pick up a copy of "The Underneath" by Kathi Appelt and you read the words, "A novel like this only comes around every few decades," on the back cover you're forgiven if you scoff a little. Uh-huh. Suuuuuure it does. But doggone it if it isn't true. Appelt in her debut novel has somehow managed to write a book that I've been describing to people as (and this is true) Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey meets Holes meets The Mouse And His Child. If that doesn't make any sense to you it is because you have never read a book quite like this. Bound to be one of those books that people either hate or love, I'm inclined to like it very very much. But that doesn't mean it isn't weird, man. Really freaky deaky weird.

"There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road." North of the Gulf of Mexico, west of the Sabine River that divides Texas and Louisiana, three hundred miles north of Houston in far East Texas a cat is left to fend for itself in a forest with her belly full of unborn kits. She is looking for somewhere safe to live, but instead she finds Ranger. Ranger is a hound, shot be accident years ago and chained ever since to the house of a man known only as Gar Face. Ranger warns the cat that this place is dangerous and that Gar Face will kill her if he finds her, but she refuses to leave. The two curl up under the house into the Underneath and there she gives birth to two kittens that she names Puck and Sabine. Unbeknownst to them Gar Face searches the nearby swamps for a massive alligator, hoping to kill it and earn the respect of the men he despises. And even further in the forest a bowl waits, containing a serpent known only as Grandmother Moccasin who remembers how she was trapped and contemplates her imminent escape. All storylines finally coincide in unpredictable, interesting ways.

I brought this book up with a fellow children's librarian, the first I'd run into that had also read the story. When asked what she thought she said, "I liked it. But I couldn't figure out who it was written for." This is more than a little understandable. The story is dark. Dark in tone and in content. Yet I think "The Underneath" will definitely have its fans and not just librarians and booksellers either. I've already heard from a couple sources about kids being read this book in class and being desperate to hear at least one more chapter. Not all children will dig it, of course. If you've a ten-year-old that can't read Charlotte's Web because they find Charlotte's death too disturbing, boy oh boy is this NOT the book for them. Other kids though, the ones with thicker skins, they will find much to love in this story. It will usher them into maturity, whether they want to go there or not. And it will use cute furry animals to do it.

The sticking point with "The Underneath" is that anyone at any time in this book could die. Ranger could die. Puck could die. Puck's mother could die. Gar-Face could die. Appelt does away with a major character fairly early in the story and because of that you lose any sense that everyone's going to be okay. The author has ratcheted up the tension to the point where you have to keep reading if only because you have this insane sense that if you don't you won't be able to protect the characters you're reading about. Does that make any sense?

But the darkness extends beyond the critters. I for one cannot think of a children's novel that spends as much time as this one does in the head of its villain. For that matter, I've never met a villain this nasty that managed to have zero redeeming characteristics and still remain three-dimensional. Gar Face is a bad man, and normally I have a real problem with children's book authors telling the audience, "This person is bad and there is nothing good about them and that's how the world works." It's not like we don't see how the guy came to be bad. We see his entire life story from a nasty bird-poisoning kid to a nasty bird-shooting adult. So why didn't I have a problem with the author rendering him in such stark black and white moral terms? I can't account for it, except maybe to say that Appelt's writing somehow manages to overcome the normal pits and fissures into which less talented authors fall.

I've read Kathi Appelt's picture books, you know. In fact, I am particularly fond of her Bubba and Beau series, following the very low-key adventures of a baby (Bubba) and his hound dog puppy (Beau). Clearly she has a thing for hound dogs. One of the things I like about those books is that Appelt has a real ear for a Texan tongue. Midwestern gal that I am, I can't think of a famous Texan children's book author, though I know there are bound to be heaps of them out there. But if we can make Appelt our honorary author of the Lone Star State then I am all for it. We need more children's books out there that take advantage of colloquialisms and distinctive turns of phrase. You'll see a couple come out every year, but few rope you in completely. Now we've Appelt taking Texas and Ingrid Law's Savvy handling Kansas. Things are looking up.

And her language. Oh, the language. Gripping story I can understand, but wrapping it in words like these cannot be easy. In the space of three sentences we see a gnarled tupelo tree and an old loblolly pine. We hear the wind in the pines and the smell of the water. The chapters are always short, often not much longer than a page, but it works in the context of the tale. And I loved the way her sentences wrap around themselves. "Ask a tree, and it will tell you about any number of traps. The steel traps of hungers, the steel jaws of gators, the vicious jaws of the water moccasins." Notice how that second sentence went from steel traps to steel jaws to vicious jaws. Beautiful.

Appelt uses repetition in such a way that the book deserves to be read aloud. "Respect. A word he had never had any truck with. Respect. It crawled down his back like a rat. He reached around as if to catch it and then held his empty hand in front of his hideous face. Respect. He wanted it." This repetition doesn't just happen in sentences that repeat a single word or phrase over and over. Ideas are repeated too. Read the book closely and carefully and you'll find that words you ascribe with families pop up again and again. The Alligator King calls Grandmother Moccasin "sister". Gar Face, searching in vain for the gator he wants to kill, calls him "brother". Grandmother Moccasin's past mistakes are centered upon her family and what happened to them. And of course, the whole story revolves around an unexpected family consisting of a dog and some cats.

Questions that come up in the reading are answered as you come to them. Why does Gar Face continue to feed a creature that he thinks betrayed him many years ago? We learn it is because the dog acts as a reminder. "Do not trust a living soul. Do not." This narrative voice is not as intrusive as a "dear reader" narrator might be, but it does act as a kind of go-between for the reader. It tells you what to do, how to think, and what goes on in the head of someone like Gar Face. The villain is a rough crude man and could never be an eloquent speaker, so the narrator serves to speak for him and explain about his past. It puts us in the mind of Grandmother Moccasin and poor chained Ranger. The narrator will even ask questions about why the world is the way it is, as if the reader had the answer.

I compare this book to "The Mouse and His Child" by Russell Hoban in large part because of David Small. Mr. Small is fine with doing carefree picture books along the lines of Imogene's Antlers or Once Upon a Banana but there's a darkness to him and to his work that occasionally peeks through the surface. The newly reillustrated Hoban book featured Small's illustrations, and they were dark moving images. In "The Underneath" Small goes even darker, his pictures never going for the obvious shot. These illustrations complement the action but Small seems to have taken a great deal of care not to distract the reader, or even create an image that the reader will look at with more interest than the text on the opposite page. He sometimes will miss a detail from the book (Hawk Man's long black hair is conspicuously absent) but for the most part his images are dead on the money.

I'm fairly certain that there will be some objection to the fact that in the middle of the book and for a very long time nothing much happens. Characters are in their respective areas and it's only until you reach the slam-bang last fifty pages or so that they begin to take action. Much of the space in-between concerns Grandmother Moccasin's past mistakes, and that's why I kept thinking of "Holes" as I read the book. The climax of the story hinges on Grandmother Moccasin's family, such as it was, and if you don't pay attention to the past then the ending of the book will strike you as unsatisfying. It may be hard for some people to invest themselves in the past when the present is so dire. Maybe that is why Appelt chose to include some magic. She didn't have to. She didn't need to. But because she did, she made Grandmother Moccasin's memories just that much more interesting. It's up to the reader to determine if it was worth it in the end.

Here is what I think the author is trying to say. This is just my own interpretation, mind you, so I could be completely off. But the book is basically telling us that there is evil in the world. It does bad things to good people, and often these people have very little recourse in their lives. There is also love in this world. Compared to evil, love does not look like much. It might just be a kitten licking a dog's ears to make it feel better. But love can win and should win and when it does win then that's the story worth telling. That's the moment worth remembering. It is up to each person to do what they can for love and in doing so understand that while it isn't always enough, sometimes it's everything you need. This isn't a pretty message or one that you can tie up with a little bow. It's also not often found portrayed as well as it is here in "The Underneath". Adults don't always like children's books to address the nature of evil, real evil, without coating it in sugar first. But as Lemony Snicket's, A Series of Unfortunate Events taught us, kids are more resilient and intelligent than we give them credit for. They can take messages like this one, process them, and draw their own conclusions. This is a book that is not always pretty, and for that very reason a lot of people are going to hate it very much. I can only hope that enough other people read it through and take what it has to say to heart. Memorable, controversial, wonderful.

Myth and Magic in the Bayou
Wow. What a book. What a story. What an amazing piece of writing.

Now I admit it took me a while to read this one. While I definitely enjoyed sad animal stories as a child, now, with the occasional exception, I avoid them. And so, when I received a gorgeously packaged ARC of Kathi Appelt's The Underneath, I admired it (as it is handsomely illustrated by David Small) , and then read the flap. "An abandoned calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up dog...." Nope. Not for me. Until someone told me it reminded her of Russell Hoban's The Mouse and his Child which happens to be one of my favorite books. So yesterday, feeling lousy with allergies, a head cold, and a painful hip (can't run which is misery for me), I pulled out the ARC and read it.

And was immediately and utterly drawn in. I read without pausing till I was done. What a remarkable book. It is an adventure, a story of myth and magic, of sadness, of family -- and is very beautifully done indeed. Yes, it is sad. Yes, there are abused animals. Even worse, some dead ones too. But, oh my goodness, is it rich and complex and gorgeous. I would have loved, loved, loved it as a child.

While I can see why someone might compare it to The Mouse and his Child because of the journey aspect of the story, the setting, and the sentiment within (and the illustrations as Small also did an edition of the Hoban book), it seems extremely different to me. Another book this reminded me of was Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux. The darkness, the multiple plot threads (from different points in time) all coming together slowly, the allegorical qualities, the magical elements are in both. But DiCamillo's like Hoban's has humor. Be warned that Appelt's book is deadly serious. Actually, the more I think about it the more it reminds me of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books, still books I love, love, love.

What is it about? Hard to describe. It takes place in a deep Southern swamp -- a place full of sentient trees, of intelligent animals, of shapeshifting creatures, a place of misery and mystery, a place of magic and myth. Within this magical yet hyper real place are two twisting and intersecting groups of beings. There is the bad man, an abused dog, a calico cat and her twin kittens. And then there is the other group. The magical and mythical one. The story threads swirl and twist around each other, a mix of the past and the present.

Just writing this makes me get all hyperbolic. Sorry! Suffice it to say I recommend it and look forward to hearing what others think about it.

Flattened by The Underneath
The Underneath: My Reaction
It must be a good book. I've never finished a book before and been absolutely, compulsively driven to write a review. I am this time. But I hated the book.

The YA authors in my writing group agreed to each read one of the books nominated for the YA National Book Award. My choice/assignment was The Underneath by Kathi Appelt. I was completely excited: an award nominee about dogs and cats! Just my cup 'o tea.

Based on the following reviews, I guess I was expecting a beautiful, lyrical story about love for/between some animals. Thirty pages in, I felt slam-dunked.

"A mysterious and magical story; poetic yet loaded with suspense."-- Louis Sachar, Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes

"The Underneath is as enchanting as a hummingbird, as magical as the clouds." -- Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal-winning author of Kira-Kira

"Rarely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me why I wanted to be a writer -- to make of life something beautiful, something enduring. The Underneath is a book of ancient themes -- love and loss and betrayal and redemption -- woven together in language both timeless and spellbinding. A classic."-- Alison McGhee, author of the New York Times bestselling Someday

"Kathi Appelt's novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung."-- Ashley Bryan, Hans Christian Anderson Award Nominee and Three-Time Coretta Scott King Award Medalist

All writers I respect. A lyrical story of redemption.

The writing is lyrical, alright. It's downright stunning prose, so much so that the only two comparisons I can make are Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison. And the magic realism is comparable, too. It's a beautiful thing. It reads like a song.

But still, I hated it.

The song is so painful and so awful and so filled with despair, abuse, abandonment, death and revenge, that there's no room for redemption. I'm used to pain and sadness in stories. Conflict is what keeps us reading, right? But here, I had to keep setting the book down because it was too painful to go on.

Most of us are familiar with the phenomenon that watching animals suffer in a story or movie is worse than watching humans suffer. All too true in this novel. I felt as if my heart were wrenched out, flattened with a meat hammer and stuffed back into my chest cavity. Not once, not twice, but again and again and again. By the end of the book, my heart had no room to celebrate redemption. It only had room to lie there, flattenend but pulsing, relieved that the death and abuse and despair were over and that the three characters who had survived the course of the story could live in peace.

I remember, decades ago, seeing "The Fox and Hound" in the movie theater. When the hound falls off the bridge deep into the ravine to his certain death, I remember as a kid being acutely aware of the fact that in order to survive watching the story, I had to emotionally detach from the falling dog. I couldn't bear it. The dog survived, barely, but my heart had detached from pain too great to bear.
By the end of The Underneath, I had detached so many times, I had no attachment left.

The story is omniscient, but we have a third-person close view of nine different characters. Refreshingly, only one of them, is human. That's my favorite part of the story, besides the language.

The book crushed my heart. It must be a good book, if a week after I finished it, I am compelled to respond to it because of its emotional impact. But I still hate it.

Maybe it's not a story for obsessed animal lovers. It's just too painful. Maybe it's a great story if all creatures involved are metaphorical or just that--creatures. Maybe. This much I know: I sure don't ever want to read it again. I don't need that much pain.