Where The Red Fern Grows is written by Wilson Rawls and is a realistic fiction about a boy named Billy and his hunting dogs in the Cherokee hills. One day Billy found an ad for: one hound for 25dollars, so Billy saves 50 dollars for two years and asks his grand pa to order the pups. When Billy goes to town to get his dogs he runs into a group of kids who beat him up. On his way back he thinks about names and comes across a tree that has the names Dan and Ann and names them Old Dan and Little Ann. After a while of training his dogs Billy goes hunting and they catch two or three every night. Billy’s grandpa wants to talk to him one day and tells him about a raccoon hunting competition and Billy goes to the competition with Old Dan, Little Ann, his dad and Grandpa. In the beauty competition Little Ann wins and gets a silver cup. In the hunting contest Billy makes it to the finals. On the last night of hunting grandpa trips and sprains his ankle but on the good side Billy wins the competition, gold cup and the jackpot of over 300 dollars. A week after the competition when Billy is hunting he realizes that he is hunting a mountain lion. After the hunt Billy understands how close he was to dying. When Billy comes home Old Dan died from a cut the lion gave him. Little Ann died shortly after from being to sad to eat anything. The next day Billy’s dad tells him that that they are moving. On the day of there departure Billy visits his dogs grave and finds on top of it a red fern.
This book was one of the best books I’ve read in a while because Billy worked very hard for two years so he could buy the hounds that he wanted more than anything and it tells you to never give up on what you really want. I thought the hunting competition was the best part of the book because after he let good things happened he snuck bad things in where you couldn’t see the bad coming from a mile away. I didn’t understand what the first chapter had to do with the book. I would recommend this book because it was very descriptive when Billy was hunting a raccoon and how there were a lot of good things happening but not too much good.
