sleepyIn my childhood youth, I spent several hours after school every day at the Raymond Library. After about a year of this, I had read about every book in the children's section, many of them dozens of times. Favorites included the Jim Kjelgaard books, the Oz books, 101 Dalmatians, all of the various old Western books with horses or dogs in them (Wolf-Eye. Cinchfoot. etc.) and this book, which I don't even want to know how many times I read before I was nine.
The pub date is 1970 on this Scholastic edition, but the book feels much older. The protagonist talks a bit like a solid teen hero of the 1950s, though there's one broad gesture to the social issues of the late 60's.
It's a story about a boy, and a semi-domesticated wolf who gets into trouble for being, well,semi-domesticated, and what (a) does to protect (b).
It's not, you know, a great book. Or profound or anything. But it's honest about the wolf and the boy and the things they do to survive, and that's kind of cool, even 37 years later.
And when I was seven or eight, I really liked it.
