The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, 2008

According to a lot of people, I should love this book. It won a Newbery Honor in 2009, was a National Book Award finalist in 2008, and received an emotional and heartfelt review from an acquaintance of mine as well as my most beloved professor. So I rushed off to the library to pick myself up a copy and got started.

The Underneath is the story of an old hound dog who lives under the porch of an abusive drunk in a bayou somewhere along the border of Texas and Louisana. Ranger, the worn-down and beaten-up dog, becomes part of a family when an abandoned cat finds her way to "the underneath", Ranger's home under the porch, and gives birth to two kittens. This unconventional quartet takes care of one another until the drunk upstairs interferes and the cats and Ranger must find their way back to one another. Meanwhile, a parallel story unfolds of a shapeshifting snake and her daughter living in the same bayou one thousand years prior.

Though Appelt is effective in conveying the setting and tone of the story (everything feels steamy, heavy, and other-worldly), the book ends up completely unappealing. There's something there with the premise. The title and the cover catch you. That gets you through the first 30 pages or so, all the while confident it will pick up. However, once you get about 100 pages in and realize you still have 213 to go, you want to give up (and I'm confident that most 12 year olds will do just that). But the awards, the professor? It doesn't matter. The poetic language is drawn out to make this book way to long and repetitive, you find yourself reading through the snake story just to get back to the cats, and your only motivation for barreling through is to see how it all ends. When an author makes her book that agonizing, you may as well not start. Who needs that half-read-book guilt over a book you'll end up wishing you hadn't begun?

I commend Appelt for taking on abuse, extreme isolation, and alcohol in a juvenile format. However, the strengths of the book (i.e. the complex "family" relationships, the continuing hope in hopeless situations, etc.) are completely overshadowed by the lumbering weaknesses.

Lessons Learned:

1. Don't judge a book by its cover.
2. Don't blindly trust book awards.