Where the Red Fern Grows
By Wilson Rawls
Hi! This book was awesome! My favorite characters were Billy and his dogs, Little Ann and Old Dan. Billy is a hardworking and determined boy. He will work hard for what he wants. Little Ann is smart and patient. She’s always the one who slows down and takes her time to find a raccoon trail. Old Dan is headstrong and aggressive. He is also very tough; he will not stop going after a trail. And if he loses a trail, he’ll search until he finds it again. This also shows that he’s persistent.
Before Billy had Little Ann and Old Dan, he said that he was sick with puppy love. He desperately wanted two hunting dogs, but his parents didn’t have the money to get him any. So he worked hard for two years to get his pups, and finally he had his grandpa order them.
When they came in, he used one of Grandpa’s coon traps to get a coon hide to train his dogs. He taught them every trick that he knew. And Billy finally got to go with them on a hunt. It was an exciting hunt and his dogs lost the trail for a little while, but once they found it again, they shot off to find the coon. When they did finally tree the raccoon, Billy saw that the tree was the biggest tree in the Ozarks. He wondered how he was ever going to cut it down.
He worked as hard as he could and then prayed for God to do the rest. It worked! A strange wind blew the tree over, and only that tree. It didn’t knock any of the other trees around it; it didn’t even make a tiny leaf fall or a branch shiver.
Billy kept hunting on his own for a while, until a bet was made Rubin and Ranie Pritchard that Billy couldn’t tree the ghost coon. The ghost coon was a coon who ran around and did fancy tricks, but could never get a dog off its trail, but when it came to a certain tree, it just disappeared.
The night that Billy went and hunted the ghost coon, a terrible accident happened. The ghost coon had just disappeared when he came to the tree. Billy found him in a hollow old fence post, but he didn’t want to kill him. Then, Rubin and Ranie’s hunting dog named Old Blue came. He got in a fight with Old Dan and Little Ann. But Old Dan and Little Ann started to kill Old Blue. Rubin Pritchard tried to get in a fight and kill Billy’s dogs. But he didn’t get far, because he slipped and fell with an ax.
Will Rubin survive this terrible fall? Will Billy’s dogs survive this terrible fate? Or will everyone die a horrendous death? As I always say, read the book to find out!
A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:
“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor – zero being not scary at all and five being majorly scary): 3
“Yucky-Lovey Stuff” (how I describe the romance factor – zero having no yucky-lovey parts in it and five having major yucky-lovey parts): 0
I give this book 5 wands.
This was an exciting adventure of a boy and his dogs. It’s amazing how Wilson Rawls can make you feel during this story. He made me cry and laugh and a whole bunch of other thing.! I think that’s what a true author does!
