Fred Gipson: Old Yeller

This book was the result of dice rolls. I originally got this book when my mother in law was downsizing her collection from her elementary school teaching days. I've never read it. I feel like in second grade, you read Old Yeller, or you read Where the Red Fern Grows, and I read Red Fern...

Old Yeller is a coming of age story that follows Travis and his family during a summer. Travis's father leaves with the other men and older boys of their settlement in Texas to take cattle to Kansas to the market. Travis is tasked with being "the man of the house" and helping his mother out with all of the household things, the farm, and watching over his brother Arliss. Everything is going well until an old dog shows up in the chickens, stealing the eggs. Travis hates the dog to start with, but grows to like him as he realizes how smart he is and what a spectacular help the dog is.

I knew going into this book that Yeller was going to die. You don't pick up a book like this about a dog and expect the dog to survive the story - it doesn't happen. I feel that maybe people might think me heartless, but I didn't really cry when the dog died. It's sad, and it sucks how the whole thing happens, but I guess because I knew it was coming...

OK, real review. This book has not really aged well. There are definitely some aspects of the novel that felt inappropriate for our time, mainly the racism around the Native Americans.

I personally didn't like the writing style of the book. I found Travis's dialect obnoxious to read. This doesn't always bother me (Huck Finn for example? Didn't bug me at all - I just read it in a Southern accent and it made sense). But for some reason, the way this book utilizes that dialect really bugged me. I also found Travis himself to be a little annoying and flat. He does have some character development, but it's slow and relatively minor.

This is an easy, elementary read, and I think most kids would like it. Rating these books is hard because they're really not written for me; they're geared toward kids who are learning to read. I personally think Where the Red Fern Grows is better, but that might be nostalgia talking.

I rated this ⭐⭐⭐

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