Taking Another Look: Teacher's Pet by Laurie Halse Anderson

Gran was right. Middle school is not as bad as I thought it would be.

It's worse.

My locker is two miles away from my classes, so I have to lug my books in a backpack all day. Each book feels like it weights fifty pounds.

All my teachers give us homework. I'm never going to get through it all, not even if I work all weekend. I wish I could go home right now and never come back.

But not yet. I have to suffer through one more class: science.

It began as a great summer for Maggie Mackenzie, helping out with her friends at her grandmother's veterinary clinic and going to the beach with the Vet Volunteers. But the final days of summer have been spoiled by the thoughts of starting seventh grade at John C. Calhoun Middle School.

Maggie's not anxious about having friends--her fellow volunteers, Brenna, Zoe, Sunita, and David, will be there too. But Maggie's knows she's not good at school: her reading is still a problem and she only finished sixth grade because Gran forced her to buckle down and work with a tutor to raise her grades. Now she has five teachers, each piling on more work than there was in sixth grade altogether. Maggie struggles with the fear that she's just not smart enough to make it through middle and high school, much less college and vet school as she had hoped.

But science class is a surprise. For openers, there is a dog in the classroom--a beautiful German Shepherd named Scout--and a long row of cages filled with mice, gerbils, hamsters, and a rabbit that she and the volunteers offer to care for. But the teacher, Mr. Carlson, is the big surprise. The dog, Scout, is there as his guide dog. Maggie learns that Carlson has been working with Scout only a week, and "dog whisperer" that she is, Maggie senses that Scout is anxious for the love and approval from his master which he is not getting.

That weekend, as Maggie struggles with her overwhelming school work, Mr. Carlson shows up at her grandmother's veterinary clinic, Dr. Mac's Place, remorseful because in his anxiety over being lost in the school building he has stepped on Scout's foot. As Gran treats the cut paw, Maggie learns that her teacher is also struggling with his new situation, having recently lost his sight and been forced to try to teach with the help of a service dog.

When Maggie fails her first science pop quiz, Mr. Carlson is empathetic with her feelings about the stepped-up requirements of middle school and promises to work with Gran and the school counselor to make sure that she learns and keeps up with her work. But it is not until Mr. Carlson and Scout are hit by a careless motorist and Scout suffers near fatal injuries that teacher and pupil realize that the changes required by their new situations are alike in many ways. As Mr. Carlson offers Maggie advice, she realizes that he is also speaking about his own problems from the heart.

Some kids make the adjustment to middle school with no problems. They make it look easy. But most of the kids I know stumble over something. They lose friends; they get cut from a team, or they run up against a tough subject for the first time. There are all kinds of obstacles. You need some help learning to go around them.

We'll do whatever it takes--arrange for extra help during study hall, help you with study skills, test your reading skills. You aren't stupid, Maggie. You just need--a guide.

Award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson's Teacher's Pet #7 (Vet Volunteers), (Puffin, 2009) now in a just-published paperback edition, offers an empathetic and unique look at the oft-portrayed middle school scene in this second book about Maggie Mackenzie, first introduced in Fight for Life #1 (Vet Volunteers). Like the other protagonists in this series, Maggie is a believable and appealing character whose love and desire for the humane care for animals gives her life meaning and direction, but who nonetheless deals daily with the problems of growing up and succeeding in school. Adult figures are also realistically presented, many (but not all) with good qualities, but who also confront the small and large problems that life brings. Incidental information about the training of guide dogs at the famous Seeing Eye facility add to the interest of this book.

Teacher's Pet #7 (Vet Volunteers),is another capable entry in an outstanding series for animal-loving 'tween readers. For other wildly popular books about young veterinary assistants, see Ben Baglio's prolific Animal Ark series.

Out of the Depths: The Underneath by Kathi Appelt

Kathi Appelt's first novel, The Underneath is a skillfully layered book which indeed goes underneath--to the primitive ebb and flow of nature and magic beneath the surface of the Texas-Louisiana bayou country where it is set, winding its way back and forth through millennia to tell a simple but primal tale as deep and dark and rich as the waters of Bayou Tartine. It is a story which at its core goes underneath to the hearts of its characters, touching the elemental loneliness which they all share.

Underneath a decaying, sagging old house in a clearing filled with rusted cans, broken glass, and the discarded skeletons of animals, a hound named Ranger lies beneath the structure, chained by his cruel owner, Gar Face. Barely human, without hope or love, existing on the barter of the skins of animals he takes from the swampland, Gar Face is himself a victim of his drunken father's hatred, a father who broke the boy's jaw and drove him away from civilization decades before. Ranger, too old and lame to hunt, is kept tied to the cabin as a watchdog and can only bay out his loneliness when his harsh master is away.

One morning his song awakens an abandoned calico cat, her belly full of kittens about to be born:

It wasn't the chirring of the mourning doves that woke the calico cat, or the uncertain sun peeking through the clouds, or even the rustling of a nearby squirrel. No, it was the baying of a nearby hound. She had never heard a song like it, all blue in its shape, blue and tender, slipping through the branches, gliding on the morning air. She felt the ache of it.

The calico follows the dog's lament to his hideout underneath the crumbling house, and there she and the lonely dog find solace in each other's company. And when the kittens, Sabine and Puck, are born, Ranger's love for the young ones is complete The dog and the three cats share what they have, a dark shelter in the underneath, Gar Face's occasional handfuls of dog food, and the mother cat's prey, hunted furtively while the man is away,--insects, lizards, and sometimes a mouse or rat. But the wise old dog also shares his knowledge of the master's wicked ways:

Do not leave the safety of the Underneath. Do not, under any circumstances, go out into the Open. DO NOT get in front of Gar Face and his gun.

But kittens are born to seek, and one day Puck forgets the rules in the joy of the sun-filled Open, and he and his mother, who rushes out to save him, are captured by Gar Face, tied in a burlap bag and gleefully thrown in the bayou to drown. Puck alone survives, learning to live on his own but always hopeful that he will hear Ranger's lament and find his way back to the two he loves.

Into this simple story of castaway animals Appelt weaves the story of two other creatures, magical creatures also living underneath--King Alligator, a thousand-year-old monster of incredible size whom Gar Face dreams of taking as a trophy that will win him the approval of humans which his deformed face has denied him, and Grandmother Moccasin, a shape-shifting lamia whose bitter loneliness at the loss of her daughter to a shape-shifting bird man causes her to be buried in a pottery jar beneath a giant lob-lolly pine. Trapped in her snake's skin and the hatred she cannot shed, she waits for an event which will bring her earthenware prison to the surface again and free her to vent her revenge.

Like the waters of Little Sorrowful Creek which wind through these woods, Appelt takes her time building the backstory of these characters, flowing back and forth through centuries as the reader comes to understand and care for them all, even Gar Face, whose final failure to find either hope or love brings the suspenseful story to a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Drawing upon the legends of the Caddo people who once lived in the bayou country, Appelt creates a world of magical realism, helping the reader see the natural world as our ancestors must have once seen it, at once physically real and yet inhabited by deep, unseen beings that are also part of the creation.

Although David Small's cover and incidental illustrations may suggest a touching and humorous story of unlikely friends, akin to Appelt's wonderfully warm and wise Bubba and Beaustories, The Underneath is a darkly complex and moving novel on a par with Shiloh or A Wrinkle in Time in its handling of the struggle between good and evil, love and hate, which runs deep to the heart of life itself. The artfully and tautly told central plotline of Ranger's and the kittens' struggle for survival will hold readers' attention from start to finish, but for thoughtful middle readers this is a once-in-a-lifetime read which will reveal much of what lies underneath the surface of life.

This novel will be one to watch at award time.

Holding On, Letting Go: Listen! by Stephanie S. Tolan

Life has handed Charley a double whammy. Her mother was killed suddenly in a plane crash while on a nature photography assignment in Brazil, and with her father turning to work to escape grief, Charley becomes emotionally dependent upon her best friend Amy. Then Charley is seriously injured in an automobile accident while Amy's brother is driving. Inexplicably, Amy leaves for a summer-long tennis camp, and with her gone, the silence and loneliness at home comes down hard on Charley.

Ordered to walk daily to rehabilitate her severely injured leg, Charley meets up with an almost feral dog, thin and wary of humans. As Charley circles the small lake near her home each day with her neighbor's playful dog Sadie, the stray dog joins them, keeping his distance but following her back home. Something about the dog draws Charley to him. Feeling that she is able to intuit his sad history with humans, Charley makes it her summer's work to tame him, and naming him Coyote, she begins to get him to accept food and finally her touch.

As she begins to feel a loving connection with the dog, Charley's heart begins to open again to her father. As she does, she finds she is able to open her mother's last published book of photos of their lake and read the quotations she had chosen for each picture. With Coyote Charley visits the places where the photos were made for the first time since her mother's death and learns to listen, as her mother taught her, to the sounds of nature and to the healing love offered by her friend Amy and her father.

In Newbery author Stephanie Tolan's hands this story becomes more than a girl-meets-dog story, as Charley's heart opens to the possibilities of life ahead for her. Listen! is a coming of age story of love lost and love found.

Stephanie Tolan's Surviving the Applewhites,a very funny but equally poignant coming of age story, was awarded the Newbery Honor Medal in 2003.