The Yearling (Aladdin Classics)

I highly recommend this book to readers. It is a very interesting story about a little boy who takes care of a young fawn; they both grow up; Jody becomes a man and the fawn becomes a yearling. But in order for Jody to let go of his boy-hood, he had to kill the yearling.
The end was so sad, you have to read it.

Great writing, description and character development. It takes you away. It is, yes, a coming of age book but almost a greater book for parents to read. It is one of many great works by this great American author. I love what she writes. Nuffield said.

Very good book and now Andrew Peterson, a song writer, has a song about it. It is called "The Ballad of Jody Baxter". All young boys should read this book. It is on the same level as "Where the Red Fern Grows".

Beautiful book. Incredible descriptions. Touching characters. Perhaps a little too much killing of animals, but seems accurate to the time and place. I had heard the book was slow and boring, but I have read the entire thing out loud to my wife and we found it enchanting.

I kept thinking that this was a childish book... But then I realized how complex and wonderful the sentence structure was.

I usually read at night to relax before going to sleep. But several nights I couldn't go to sleep, adrenaline rushing with a sudden twist or turn that endangered the characters.

I also enjoyed it because I live in Florida and kept trying to imagine the locales in the book before "civilization" took over.

THis classic can be read in any version; however, I was looking for a copy that had wider margins. I had hoped my son would be able to draw the various plants and animals mentioned in the book on the side.

VERY slow but OK prose - until very abrupt ending suggestibly attempting to create a modern Shakespear tragedy: you wait forever for the boy to find the faun, watch them grow together dearly then within pages the mother shoots the fawn in the leg with a, "smoking shotgun", they boy finishes it off by pressing the muzzle of the gun against the back of the fawn's neck as it peers up at him with, "liquid eyes", then runs away from home to eventually return to live happily ever after ----- all within the last two chapters.
We want our daughter to love reading - not abhor it. She sobbed when telling me this conclusion. Effective literature? To those with little vision maybe>

I've read a lot of classics recently, ("Old Yeller", "Pollyanna", "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"), and with only a few exceptions I have been pleased and impressed by these books. They are all better written and more engaging than their old-timey classics status might suggest. "The Yearling" falls into this category, for all of the reasons touched on my its many admirers.

What seems to be somewhat in dispute is "who should read this" and "when should they read it". The book is long, (well over 400 pages); in part the dialogue is in a lost vernacular; it's quiet and subtle. Many reviewers dismiss young and modern readers as potential fans because the book lacks sex, violence, swearing and explosions. That strikes me as a shallow and rather unfair indictment of young readers.

I do think the book is challenging for young readers and that many of its strengths would not be readily appreciated by a younger reader. Early on in the book we learn why the father, Penny, chose to live in the Florida scrub rather than more comfortably in a river city. This turns into a touching meditation on freedom, independence, human mendacity, and the pleasures of living somewhere that affords you a little elbow room. While I understood what Rawlings was driving at here I'm not sure a young reader would have had the life experience to even register what was being addressed in those passages. So it goes, throughout the book.

Now maybe I'm all wet, but many of the pleasures of this book, it seems to me, are ahead of young readers. They haven't addressed in their own lives and minds what is being portrayed in this book. The result is that the book seems dull or boring or pointless. There are lots of "classics" that fall into this trap, (I'm looking at you Willa Cather), and forcing them on kids isn't going to help anyone.

So, I'm keeping this on the shelf and I'm keeping an eye on what the kids are reading, understanding and appreciating. Let the kid come to book; be ready to try it more than once; wait for the lightbulb to go on.

Maybe you've seen the film version with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. The movie is good, but it doesn't do justice to the book. Most people will tell you the book is about a boy and his pet fawn. It's about much more than that. Young Jody Baxter lives in the backwoods of Florida in the years following the Civil War. His family is poor, and they have to deal with the challenges of life on the frontier. He does indeed find a young fawn and takes it in for a pet, but that's only a small part of the story. The larger story is about a young boy learning about the harsh realities of the world, and in the process he discovers that life isn't always fair.

The book contains a lot of humor, but also a lot of sadness. I recommend it to people of all ages.

"The sun was sinking into the saw-grass. The marsh was golden. The whooping cranes were washed with gold. The far hammocks were black. Darkness came to the lily pads, and the water blackened. The cranes were whiter than any clouds, or any white bloom of oleander or of lily. Without warning, they took flight."

- <i>The Yearling</i>, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I read <i>The Yearling</i> once as a kid, when I loved boy-and-nature coming of age stories like The Pond and Rascal. It went over my head. I remember fleeting scenes: the day swelteringly hot, humid, tense, and a dark rattlesnake coiled on a dusty footpath uncurls faster than a flicked whip and strikes. I remember there's a deer but I also remember being disappointed that it doesn't appear until halfway through the novel, and the whole first half is incredible slow-paced. I remember the ending was sad, but not why.

The things I notice as an adult are very different. The book is still slow, but it's because it's dense, has a lot of meat to it, and you have to stop and digest every few pages. The language isn't pretty or flourishy, but it's simple and vivid. Complex ideas are handled the whole time without ever being directly confronted, so the quotable lines are few and far between.

The story is set in north Florida, post-civil war, and I don't think I've ever read a novel set in Florida that so well captures the character of its landscape. The sea is barely in the story at all, but the book still calls up that part of the country effortlessly, naming its native botany with a skill now mostly lost. My parents grew up in north Florida, and I lived there until I was eight, so the names of trees and flowers, the descriptions of soil and storm, added to the feeling of lost innocence, an eden that cannot be reclaimed, that the whole novel evokes. The boy Jody, the central character, is an only child, about 11 or 12 when the book begins. He lives on a subsistence farm that is barely making out. He's spoiled by his father and ignored or scolded by his mother, and their family's isolation gives him a sort of existential loneliness.

It's fascinating and troubling to read about a time when you literally had to kill something in order to eat, and that primal struggle to survive draws forward a lot of raw ideas that hurt to touch, especially if you've been raised without farming or hunting or death really being a part of your life. Jody loves animals and hates killing them, but he also recognizes that if his family doesn't hunt they won't have enough to eat. Even if they were able to subsist on a vegetarian diet, the farm is being constantly threatened by predators that also have to be killed. Bears and wolves attack their milk cow, and foxes steal their corn. And yet Jody and his father love living on their isolated farm in large part because it is so wild. Even though they have to fight for their lives every minute, they find time for wonder and awe. In one section, tormented by wolves killing all their livestock, they set out with their neighbors to intentionally kill every wolf in north Florida (I hadn't even known there ever were wolves in north Florida, if that tells you how successful/common this type of hunt was). Months later, they see a single limping wolf sneak into the yard of the house to play by moonlight with one of their dogs. They watch in wonder from the window. "Hit's almost certain the last one," says Jody's father. "Pore thing, hurt and lonesome-- Come visiting' its nighest kin to pick a play." That aching sense of self-inflicted, inevitable loss pervades the whole novel.

I was an ardent conservationist as a child, and maybe that's why I didn't love this book the first time I read it. It presents harshly the real struggle for resources between people and animals, and to some extent, between people and people. I remember feeling shocked at Jody's constant confrontation with death. Rawlings captures in a golden haze that time when you have become unselfish enough to truly love but do not yet believe in loss, and it cannot be fully appreciated as a novel until you have crossed that threshold yourself. People who love nature, like Jody and his father, do not want to see it as the vicious, brutal, mysterious, complex balance it really is, and that vision, repeated in different ways throughout the book, is what finally brings Jody into adulthood.

In 1938 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Since then this classic of Cracker life in Northern Florida has remained in print, delighting readers who fall under the spell of its enchanted prose and grand story of growing up.
Though The Yearling is at its heart the story of Jody Baxter, the only living child of Penny Baxter and his wife Orry, and Jody's love for a fawn which he has brought to the Baxter farm, this fine novel is also the story of a group of people living at the outward rim of society, the hardships which they encounter, and the fabulous natural world with which they are surrounded. After moving to Cross Creek, Florida, in the late 1920s, Marjorie Rawlings carefully studied the land and the people she found there. Eventually, she worked her notes and observations into this novel about a boy and his pet deer, and the demands of love and survival. Here we meet the Forresters, a rough country family who scrabble constantly to scratch their living from the harsh land. We meet Fodder-Wing, the Forrester who is sickly and weak, but whose affinity for nature and all its creatures imbues this novel with its strong sense of the natural environment and its importance even in a world in which the city holds sway.
Rawlings followed up The Yearling with Cross Creek, the story of her own life in Northern Florida and the lives of her neighbors, of working the orange grove, of exploring the swamps and forests surrounding Cross Creek. She tells us of her struggles on the land, of her eccentric and wild neighbors, of the blacks and poor whites who helped her raise her oranges. In Cross Creek we are given a piece of Northern Florida as it was in the 1930s, for Rawlings joins herself, body and blood, to the land. Here, for example, she writes of the road she walked in front of her house:
"Every pine tree, every gallberry bush, every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is vibrant. I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees beside me is easing. I ahve wlked it indespair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night's darkness. For all such things were on the earth before us, and will survive after us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and be comforted."
If you've read Rawlings, rejoice that she once lived and wrote these books. If not, you should expect a great treat.

Not surprising that all the negative reviews are from kids made to read this for school. So sad. This story is a classic. So well written and poignant for its time (set in 1870 in rural America). I am disappointed that children cannot find anything interesting that isn't plugged in. My children are home schooled and love this book and others like it. They are beginning to appreciate stories without a happily ever after, and extract the greater value and character building in it. We read Great Books for a reason: advanced vocabulary, superior use of language and writing style, strong characters, and cultural context, which teaches both history and compassion. Great books build deeper thinking. Video games do not.

An incomparable story of growth and survival in the most difficult conditions. The Yearling, set in the scrubland of northern Florida a couple of decades after the Civil War, is the story of the Baxter family: little "Penny" Baxter, the father, a saintly figure who is wise, understanding, kind, brave, dutiful, stoic; Ory, the mother, whose essential goodness has been buried to some degree by endless toil and the death of several babies; and Jody, who is about 12 when the story begins, a good-natured sprite for whom nature is benevolent and everything is to be explored.

The Baxters live some 15 miles from the nearest town and four miles from their nearest neighbors, the Forresters, a family of massive sons who are variously good hearted and murderous drunks. In this environment, the little Baxter family scratches out its existence.

Two themes predominate: the loss of childhood innocence and Implacable Nature. The latter is depicted in a variety of ways: a legendary maurauding bear that is seemingly impossible to kill; a pack of hungry wolves several dozen strong; a flood that destroys everything in its path and leaves the plague in its wake; a terrible poisonous snake that threatens the life of one of the characters. In this unforgiving environment, Penny forges ahead at all times, hunting and farming to provide for his little brood, rarely at a loss despite the continual setbacks that afflict "Baxter's Island," the small territory that the family owns.

It's not all harshness, however. Moments of beauty break through at intervals, particularly when father and son are off on a leisurely hunt. There is often a great reverence shown for flowers, trees, waterways, birds, animals, and the landscape as a whole. A lovely character named Fodder-wing (of the Forrester clan) has a whole backwoods menagerie, one that young Jody would duplicate were it not for opposition from his mother, who knows all too well the trouble that animals can cause once they have grown to maturity.

The consolation prize for Jody is Flag, a fawn that he claims after its mother has been killed. Jody loves Flag as much as any 12-year-old boy in the world today loves his dog--much more, really, since it is the only thing in the world that is exclusively his.

Over the course of a year, Jody lives through all the terrors that nature--and, sometimes, man--can inflict and prepares, unknowingly, to eventually take over Penny's role as provider for the family. In the opening chapter, Jody has a particularly fine time off on his own, in the woods, and when it is over he cannot sleep because "a mark was on him from the day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember." It is the last full day of his childhood innocence.

By the end, when events have taken their difficult course, it is Penny who must counsel Jody and explain how he wanted to spare Jody as long as he could from the rigors of adulthood. He explains, "A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'." But, as he points out, life knocks you down, and when you get up, it knocks you down again. "What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on." And Jody understands and takes up his new responsbility, to himself and to his family.

I haven't conveyed in this short review the brilliance of the descriptions of the landscape and all it contains, the richness of the many characters who populate the book, or the excitement of the twists and turns that befall the characters--but it's all there. I will close by saying that although The Yearling is catgorized as a sort of children's book, it is one that adult lovers of literature would enjoy; moreover, it would be difficult to read for those under the age of 15, I would think.

Also, for those considering reading this book to their children, as I just did, keep in mind that it's not for the squeamish. As Penny says, and as the book reveals, "You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks. You've messed around with ol' Starvation. Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy."

Jody faces the harsh realities of life and grows from a boy into a man in this Pulitzer prize-winning book for middle school readers. Jody and his folks live a hard life on a Florida farm in the late 1800's. He gets very little schooling, but instead is expected to help out with the chores: hoeing, hauling in wood for the fire, and tending the cow, the pig, and the chickens. Everyone in the family must pitch in to make sure there's food on the table every day.

When Jody desperately wants to take in an orphaned fawn as a pet, his father agrees, even though the fawn will need to drink some of their precious milk. Jody rescues the fawn and loves it as he's never loved anything.

As time goes on, the boy has to take on a greater share of the work. Even though he's busy, Jody delights in watching the fawn grow, and the two of them play together as the best of friends. However, the family's troubles mount when Jody's father is seriously injured. Then Jody faces, not just hard work, but the most difficult decision of his life.

The author's knowledge of farming, hunting, and the habits of animals is amazingly detailed. You'd think she herself lived that hardscrabble life of half a century earlier (The Yearling was published in 1938).

Rawlings has woven together a powerful story and a rich and detailed world into a profound vision of the joy and pain of life. She's an amazing writer: the final sentence, which captures the theme of the novel, is a poetic image that pierced my heart.

This was written in a time when the pace of storytelling was slower than today's novels. This and the detailed descriptions could be off-putting to some young readers, but lovers of literature, whatever their age, will revel in her prose and be moved by the compelling story.

In past reviews, people have speculated that if The Yearling were to have been published in today's times, would it still have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. For me, I would have to say that that would be a resounding yes. I say so because the novel captures, with vivid simplicity, a bygone American era via the stark usage of the literaty resources available to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at the time, quite simply, the values, environment and language which surrounded her. Being the excellent and astute writer that she was, she transposed those raw yet natural elements to her characters, specificially the gruff yet loving Baxter clan.

In a time where people are adrift due to the constant onslaught of materialism, celebrity, technology, vanity, money, you name it, the Baxter clan are a refreshing anomaly, for all of the above was not really available to them, and if it was, it was to a very limited degree. But because of that humbling deprivation, they as a family and individualistically speaking, were interiorily richer in so many different capacities. Their lessons came from the law of the land, the primal yet earthy philosophy of kill or be killed. But it was also a deep almost religious respect of the land and its animals that could definitely shape the thinking and the ever evolving twists and turns that are in abundance in The Yearling. Ezra Baxter-Jody's father-to some extent, could be considered as the Atticus Finch of the Florida backwoods, for he respects the codes that govern the wilderness and for the wild animals who occupy it. And thus, he kills only when necessary; he imbues that code of ethics in Jody who is of a tremendously malleable age, especially by the Forrester family and their sometimes less-than-stellar behavior.

The novel is about being a boy, about growing up and about sacrifice, and when Jody, a lone child, adopts a fawn whom he names Flag, the emptiness of being a lone child abates; the fawn, a cherished pet, is a co-experiencer with Jody of the highs and lows of living in the scrub country, and he is there for Jody's various milestones, his inching along toward the tower of manhood. But sometimes just doing the day-to-day obligations of life is simply not enough. Sometimes one has to go beyond what is expected, and the latter half of the book illustrates that sacrifice entails pain, large or small, for real love sometimes does hurt. The Yearling is pungent, pure, simple, true and very very giving, absolutely worthy of the 1939 Pulitzer Prize.

I'd never given much thought to The Yearling, but apparently I thought it was some kind of young adult novel. I remember first noticing it on my list of Pulitzer winners and being a bit surprised. However, not only did it win the Pulitzer - it deserved it.

The general story is that of a boy named Jody living in the Florida backwoods. He works the land with his father and goes on adventuresome hunting trips, but has no people his own age to spend time with. After years of begging for a pet, his mother finally agrees to let him take a young doe in. Then your heart gets broken about a thousand times.

The writing could easily have been cheesy or overly dramatic, but it wasn't. It was crisp, exact and made excellent use of dialectical dialouge, which I'm not usually a fan of. I was really captured by this book and immensely enjoyed reading it.

That said, the whole thing with the yearling was a little weird, seriously. Like, the thing lived in his house? With him? It was a deer!! Deer don't live in houses!

Majorie Kinnan Rawlings had a great deal of talent, and did a *lot* of research for this book that takes place in 1871-1872. She also was blessed with the most brilliant of editors, Max Perkins, who was an editor for 20th century literary giants like Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

It was Perkins who kept Rawlings on track with her novel, reminding her that the novel should not be just written 'for a boy' but also 'about a boy'. He was the one who pointed out to her that her writing genius lay in stringing together episodes rather than hatching out intricate plots. In addition, it was Perkins who reminded Rawlings that the setting was full of tough times and tough people & she should avoid the theatricality and romanticism that sometimes crept into early drafts of the novel and really strive to emphasize, even increase the naturalism.

Finally, Perkins remained dissatisfied with Rawlings' early title: The Fawn. He suggested that she find a more symbolic title. When she came up with titles like The Flutter-Mill or Juniper Island, he held her to her task, saying that there was not enough human suggestion. When she sent him a list including the eventual title, Perkins was satisfied that this was the right one.

Shortly after that, Rawlings decided what she'd written was inferior & threw it out. Perkins prodded her to get going again. This book IS a classic, Rawlings WAS talented, unbelievably so, but neither would be as true if it were not for the dedicated brilliance of Max Perkins. Read THE YEARLING & also the excellent biography of Perkins by A. Scott Berg.

This charming tale of a family in backwoods Florida starts out a little cute and the accents are very dated, but you meet the Baxters and the Forresters and everyone else...and it's no picnic. Life is hard and will kick your guts out again and again, and you have to just get up and take it for your share.

Halfway through the book the boy adopts a baby deer. You think this is adorable, but it's foreboding. Life is not a Disney movie and pet deer do not mix with backwoods farmers living hand-to-mouth.

The poor boy is exposed to lesson after brutal lesson that shatter his innocence, yet the story is so rich you cannot put it down long. Everything he believes safe about the world is destroyed. And yet he goes on, just as his Pa taught him.

I cried at the end.

The Yearling definetly belongs on the classics list.

The reader is transported about 100 years into the past. When times were tough and everyone poor. Most survive on crops and livestock. Thus depending on Mother Nature to cooperate. A bad year equals winter hunger.

Young Jody is a boy who by the end of the book has grown into a man. Not by size but by maturity. When his father is stricken down, Jody must step in and help his mother to run the farm. Gone were his lazy days of childhood play. Those days were replaced with the hard work of a man taking care of farm and family.

Throughout this adventure, Jody is faced with some tough decisions. The kind which are made by a man. With a broken heart, Jody knew what he had to do. When his farm is nearly destroyed and the guilty culprit must be addressed.

This book is a great read from older child to adult.
Renee Robinson, [...]
books:https://www.the store.com/author/reneero...

I'm a 7th generation Floridian though not a Cracker. Cracker's in the Olden Times lived on the edge pretty much like the Baxter's did in this 1870s tale. Life in the Florida "scrub" was always difficult and always a challenge. Sugar-sand, pines,and palmettos. Crackers existed by hunting, foraging, fishing, theft, and farming enough corn to take care of their most basic needs. Killing a deer who eats your corn was the reality, killing a bear who slaughters your calf was the reality. Killing a neighbor who poached your hog was the reality. Because these kinds of insults to your welfare could not be tolerated, and Crackers had no luxuries or slack to draw upon when emergencies came along. Root hog! or die! This is what the book is about: Making the transformation from a child-like innocence of life, to a mature acceptance of the harsh realities of living. Many adults never make the change. Rawlings elevates and enobles the Baxters somewhat; in reality they would have been coarse and crude and unsympathetic characters, hardened by a life of hard-times. But the book is about becoming an adult and setting aside childish things and ways. Excellent writing and absorbing story.

'The Yearling' is a simple story about people living off the land in rural Florida circa 1870. We learn about one particular family's hardships and the love between a boy and his pet fawn. The author does a stellar job capturing the local language and culture. It's all very touching.

Bottom line: one of those few books deserved to be called a classic. Strongly recommended.

7/7 Review: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Five stars out of five=loved it

The problem with books and movies that are set in the South is that often the people of the South, aka Southerners, are all portrayed as ignorant, racist and frankly, quite scary. The number one most refreshing thing about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "The Yearling" is that Southerners are made into real people. Admittedly, the Baxter family of her novel is quite ignorant by our modern standards, but as a portrayal of a 1930's backwoods dirt-poor Florida family, her characterization and descriptions are something to immediately get lost in.
The Yearling tells the story of Jody Baxter, his father Penny, his "Ma" Ory and their encounters with the wild Florida scrub around them as well as the wild neighbors they share the land with. Each chapter is formulated to be a perfect short glimpse into a different month, a different season, and a different struggle for the Baxters. Long before Jody finds the Yearling for which the book is named, we develop a bond with the characters of the book as we follow their daily activities and wonder at their simple pleasures.
The language and style that Rawlings uses is also spot on. The phrases that the Baxters and their rowdy neighbors, the Forresters, give us provide comic relief as well as a sincerity and honesty to the work.
The story is poignant and memorable as we grow up with Jody and his fawn, and learn the tough decisions that one must make as we transition into adult-hood. This book has earned the title of a beloved classic, and its appearance on school reading lists cannot be seen often enough. This is a must read for every Southerner and especially for adolescents who are making the hard journey towards maturity that Jody shares with us.

This classic novel was written by an author who wrote it at her home a few miles south of Gainesville (in Cross Creek, Florida) and it won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It is about life in rural central Florida in the second half of the 19th century, being centered around a boy (Jody Baxter), his family, and his pet fawn (Flag). Throughout the novel, the reader sees a boy growing up and having to face some tough decisions. We also learn much about the natural history, environment, folk remedies and beliefs, and culture of rural Florida. We also learn how precarious one's existence is out in the wild. Jody's father, Penny Baxter, has to kill a doe in order to use a folk remedy for a snake bite, not knowing that there is a little fawn nearby. Jody keeps the fawn to raise and to have as a friend. But, as the fawn grows older, problems arise. The author based her main characters loosely (very loosely) on a rural family she knew living in central Florida. Contrary to most reports, this family did not live in Cross Creek. They had a small place deep in the woods in the center of what is now the Ocala National Forest. I decided to see if I could find that site in the late 1980s. It turned out not be difficult at all. Armed with a map of the National Forest, I went on a hike (on some beautiful trails) and found the place. Nothing remains of the house. However, the family burial plot is still there, as are the graves of most of the members of the family. Unfortunately, it is sad to report that a number of the headstones have been stolen. Some of the stones referred to Civil War veterans. As you probably know, such stones draw very good prices on the "black market." The Forest Service had signs posted to warn people against stealing items but, being deep in the woods, they were taken anyway. I'm certain that the people who took the stones have no idea of their literary significance. Perhaps one day the Forest Service or some historical organization will replace the stones, but with all the cutbacks in funding, it'll probably be a long time before that happens.

Every time someone refers to Children's literature as a genre less worthwhile than general fiction or Children's authors as second-class writers, I bring up this book. The Yearling was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
The Yearling is a coming of age book set in the hard-scrabble scrub of Florida around the turn of the century. It is filled with the embarrassment and delight felt by a 12-year-old boy named Jody Baxter. One minute, Jody whirls faster and faster, arms held straight from his shoulders like a water-turkey's wings, until he becomes dizzy and drops to the ground, and then the next, he longs to follow his father, mix with men, and learn their ways.
The Florida in this story is as much frontier as was the Wild West. This is a Florida unimagined by all those children who visit Orlando. This is a Florida inhabited by panthers that have cubs with blue spots, by bears that walk upright down the road like men, and by whooping cranes that dance cotillions in the marshes. This is a Florida where one's nearest neighbor lives four miles away, and a family has to work constantly to have enough food to survive another winter.
Jody and each of his parents face these hardships differently. The story begins on a day when Jody is just a boy, addled with April and dizzy with Spring. He is the youngest and only surviving Baxter child. Jody thrived when one frail baby after another had sickened and died, almost as fast as they came. Jody's mother seems to have given "all she had of love and care and interest to those others." Jody's father is "a bulwark for the boy against the mother's sharpness."
"Leave him kick up his heels and run away," the father thinks. "Leave him build his flutter-mills. The day'll come, he'll not even care to."
Jody forgets his work and makes mistakes but his father covers for him. The boy's only problem seems to be loneliness, but even that is eased when his parents allow him to keep an orphaned fawn. The fawn and the boy grow up, becoming yearlings together. By the end of one year, Jody has sat up all night at his best friend's wake, been beaten for helping another friend against three bullies, become enemies with his neighbors over their burning an old woman's home, and tried to run away only to realize there is nowhere else he wants to be. He learns love and disappointment, as well as the fallibility of his father. Jody learns that life is "powerful fine, but 'tain't easy." And knowing all this, Jody enters manhood, leaving childhood. However,
"A mark was on him from [that first April] day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember."
Note on reading level classification:
While this book is listed as a Young Adult Reading Level book, I read the book when I was in the fifth grade and would recommend it to children of that age level or above. While a certain amount of maturity and emotional sophistication is required in order for the reader to fully understand and appreciate the issues raised in the book, my eleven-year-old daughter had no trouble doing so, and in fact, she was deeply moved by the story. Our family read the book aloud to one another during a week's vacation in a log cabin the mountains. It was a wonderful and rare experience to share this book in that remote location with no telephone nor TV to distract us.
Reviewed by Linda Murphy
Children's Editor of the Writers Hood

I originally wasn't planning to write another review for the store.com, but the movie of "The Yearling" was on TV last night. Remembering how it touched me, especially the sorrowful end, I decided to take a look at the reviews posted here.

Most were brilliant, right to the point, and then I saw "kid's review" and a few others that found the book boring.

Sorry, children, that in an age of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan, not to mention strumpets like Britney and Jessica Simpson you don't have the chance to come of age. Or to appreciate a classic, moving read. Yes, we're an image and media-driven society, and the negative effect of it all falls on these kids who not only hate a classic, but can't even write why they hate it in a meaningful review.
This the price we are paying when our kids can't feel struggle, pity, or hurt.

"The Yearling" was a very realistic tale of the life of a poor American family struggling to make ends meet in late 19th Century Florida, and of a boy who like many today, doesn't understand that there is bitter besides the sweet in life - especially when it comes to the loss of a beloved pet. I can only wish that some of the sorry weirdos who have recently murdered schoolchildren or another weirdo denizen of Florida had read this book, or the Twain and Jack London classics when they were children. They might have learned something good and moral beyond the twisted thoughts that they came of age with.

This book, along with the aforementioned Twain and London classics, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and Bill Bennett's "Book of Virtues" should belong on the bookshelf of any and all American mid-and upper-elementary school age children.

I teach 6th grade and I would not hesitate in recommending this book or any of the classics that I grew up reading to my students.