Sounder by William H. Armstrong

Reviewed by Ellen

Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

1970 Newbery Medal Winner

Ratings Explanation

Language:  One instance of an offensive racial epithet.

Violence:  The boy’s father is gruffly and cruelly manhandled and chained when arrested; the men shoot the boy’s dog in the road; a somewhat graphic description of the dog’s suffering and injury; the boy is treated harshly when visiting his father in prison; he vividly imagines a cruel fate for the jailer; a detailed description of a bull being choked, strangled, and prodded to death.

Adult Themes:  The boy’s father steals a ham to feed his family and is arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to hard labor for his crime.  As the story is set in the deep South in the late 19th century, social injustice and prejudice are a major theme in the book.  Also death, uncertainty, hunger, hardship, and pain are all addressed.

Synopsis

This is the story of a poor sharecropper’s son and his loyal companion, a coon hound named Sounder.  The boy’s father and Sounder come home night after night from possum hunting empty-handed.  But one morning, the delicious, sweet smell of ham and sausage fills their tiny shack; finally, the family will eat a real meal.  But then the sheriff and his deputies come to arrest the father for stealing.  The mother is quiet as he is dragged away; the children cry; Sounder breaks free, chases after the sheriff’s wagon, and is shot in the middle of the road.  The boy finds a shot-off piece of Sounder’s velvet ear in the road and puts it in his pocket.  (“He was going to put it under his pillow and wish that Sounder wasn’t dead.”)  Sounder disappears, presumably to die somewhere, and the boy is broken-hearted.  His mother tells him, “You must learn to lose, child. . . Some people is born to keep.  Some is born to lose.  We was born to lose, I reckon.”

Time passes.  Months after Sounder’s disappearance, the dog wanders back home.  He is as thin as a skeleton, missing part of his ear and head, blind in one eye, and limping on three legs.  He no longer barks.  He is a shell of his former, robust self.  The boy wanders from county to county in an attempt to find his father, who has been sentenced to hard labor.  Years go by and his father finally returns.  He is now crippled and limping from a mine blast, but he is home at last.  Sounder barks at his master’s return.  One day the boy’s father lays down to die in the woods, and soon thereafter, Sounder gives up the ghost.  The boy learns that hardship for his family is a way of life, but remembers something he read in a book, “Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead,” which he interprets to mean if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever.

This is a powerful and moving book, subtle in its writing style yet deep in its nuances.  Names are left out of the story, and the characters are referred to as simply “the boy,” “the boy’s father,” and “the woman,” lending them the universality of the common, oppressed spirit.  I found some parts hard to read because it was so heart-wrenching and, to be honest, depressing.   It might even be hard to bear for particularly sensitive children (i.e.:  the scene where Sounder is shot is painfully detailed), but it gives the reader a deeper understanding of the social injustices of the day.  A favorite line of mine:  The boy had heard once that some people had so many books they only read each book once.  But the boy was sure there were not that many books in the world.

©2010 The Literate Mother