Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.Ī sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.Ī collection of parental wishes for a child. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown.

This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. A moving segment of early frontier America.Ī paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere. But most important there was Old Yeller, a big ugly yellow cur, whom Travis hated at the start and grew to love and trust and depend on, up to the tragic and dramatic end. And - a fairly shadowy figure- there was his mother, taking her share and more, in the struggle for existence. There was a small brother, violent in protest against Travis as disciplinarian. There was a constant battle against skunks and coons in the corn patch and the melons. There were the cattle that had to be gentled for milking. There were the hogs who ran wild and some of the most exciting parts of the story tell of the roping and branding of the young. Travis is thirteen when his father goes off on the long cattle trail to Abilene, leaving him as man of the house.

In Old Yeller the story is told as a boy might share his own experience of growing up - the dialect is no more insistent-possibly less so- than in The Yearling. This was particularly true in Hound-Dog Man, which for some readers was marred by the vernacular. Gipson, in earlier books, has evinced an evocative quality which recaptures for the reader the sounds, the smells, the sights of the region he knows and loves, recaptures too the emotional quality, the moods of his central figure. A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom.

Fred gipson before old yeller