When his father sets out on a cattle drive for the summer, fourteen-year-old Travis is left to take care of his family and their farm, and he faces new, unanticipated and often perilous responsibilities in the wilderness of early fronteir Texas. Such a book, we submit, is Old Yeller to read this eloquently simple story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country is an unforgettable and deeply moving experience. 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.Awarded the Newbery Honor When a novel like Huckleberry Finn, or The Yearling, comes along it defies customary adjectives because of the intensity of the respouse it evokes in the reader. 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.
Summary: A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom.
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