Appelt, Kathi: The Underneath
The Underneath
Writer: Kathi Appelt
Drawings By: David Small
Genre: Children's Lit (Ages 9-12)
Pages: 311
It's been forever since I've read a book that's truly considered Children's Lit. Okay, so forever really means a couple of years, but the last time I read a children's lit book, it was because I had to for school. Not so here.
Here, we have a title recommended to me by the wondrous dwarvanamazon, who had the title recommended to her by her SHU mentor. Me, being practically unable to resist a book about cats, promptly put the sucker on my wishlist. In fact, I almost bought it back in June, but I was worried it might show up as a graduation gift, so I waited.
Since it didn't, I picked it up as soon as I saw it again. I also made it my priority to read it as soon as possible, and hey, with all the dark stuff I'm reading lately, I'm glad.
The premise: Despite the dangers of a house in the middle of nowhere, an abandoned calico cat, pregnant with kittens, is drawn to the beauty of an old hound's song. The hound, Ranger, is chained to the tilting house of his awful master, Gar Face, and protects his new friend and her children from the horrors that await then should they leave the safety of the underneath of the house. Entwined with this tale is also that of a lamina, Grandmother Moccasin, trapped inside a jar at the base of a loblolly pine for a thousand years. She tells her tale of love and betrayal, and waits for the chance to be set free once more.
Spoilers ahead.
It starts out as an odd tale. There's not a single creature whose POV we don't get. The calico cat, the hound, the kittens, Gar Face, the Alligator King, Grandmother Moccasin, and even the trees of the forest. Set in the swamps/bayou of East Texas, Appelt creates a world full of myth, folktale, and magic, and most of all, a careful tale of love, hate, and promises.
There's so many lovely moments in this book. I love the recurring motifs, like the attraction of music, which brings two unlikely creatures to love. The illustrations were great, and my only complaint was that there weren't more of them. Shame, that.
Despite the uber-short chapters and the fast pace of the book, it took a little while to get into this. Like I said, there's not a single POV that gets ignored, but the lovely thing is that Appelt moves smoothly from one POV to another, without it being omniscient, if that makes a lick of sense. Perhaps that's just a storyteller's gift, but it works, and works well. What finally hooked me was the real sense of conflict and danger when the calico cat drowns and Puck is on his own, and when Grandmother Moccasin's story starts coming together. Granted, I wasn't all that sure how the book would end, though I'd placed by bets on the Alligator King eating Gar Face. It was Grandmother Moccasin who perplexed me, because she was a potential threat to the current story, but her choice in the end was a good one, and the revelation that the hummingbird was actually her granddaughter was fantastic. That one, I didn't expect, even though I kept wondering what the granddaughter had turned into.
And I really, really liked the love story between Night Song and Hawk Man. Go figure. But it was good to see myth and folklore mixed with Native American culture, and I loved the tragedy of it all. Very nicely done.
I did have some trouble with the voice and poetry on the prose. Sometimes, perhaps images would've helped punctuate things, and while I didn't read the book aloud, I felt that some sentences, came out of nowhere and disrupted the flow of the story. But who knows--maybe one day, if I ever read this book aloud, I might feel differently.
My Rating
Must Have: it's a tough book to review, I think because for me, it's so easy to enjoy on an emotional level, and it's never easy to objectify emotion. But the book has some lovely ingredients, the setting, the characters, the themes, that make this a worthwhile addition to reading palette. Particularly if, like me, you're a sucker for stories about cats. In some ways, this book reminded me of something Ursula K. Le Guin would write (I'm remembering the wonderful Catwings tales), and that is nothing to sneeze at.
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