Sounder by William H. Armstrong

 

"Child, child, you must not go into the woods again. Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don't know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon. But Sounder might come back."

             -the boy's mother, from the novel

I had read this youth novel years ago and found it very cheap in a used bookstore. My goal was to leave it in a LFL where children likely search for books. I decided to reread it first. 

It is quite old, published in 1969, but highly acclaimed, winning the prestigious Newbery Award in 1970. It tells a short and pretty sad story about a sharecropping family pre-Civil Rights. When the father is caught stealing food for his family, he is taken to jail leaving behind a wife and several young children. When the family's beloved hunting hound, Sounder, tries to follow the sheriff's wagon, he is shot, disappears and is feared to be dead. The oldest child, called only "the boy" in the novel, searches everywhere for Sounder. (In fact, none of the characters have names other than the dog and the setting is ambiguous making the story more universal, perhaps.) When his father is moved from the jail to a work detail, the boy tries to find him, as well. 

Of course, I will not spoil the ending. I would recommend Sounder for later elementary students. My rating is 4.