Sharon Barrow Wilfong's Reviews > The Yearling

I was not expecting to enjoy this book as I did. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings simply was not an author I had a remote interest in. I went to the library and happened to see some books for sale for a dime. There was one containing the letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Max Perkins. I had no idea who Max Perkins was and I did not care for Rawlings.

But there is something about a thick hardcover selling for a dime that I find irresistible. So I bought it and eventually read it.

I am glad I did, because by the time I finished the 628 page tome, I was enamored with both Max Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; hence this review of my latest finished read, The Yearling.

On the one hand, this book is about the day to day survival of families living off of the land in Central Florida in the 1870s and has a lot in common with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books. They both show the joy and hardship of trying to survive by one's own exertion on an often stubborn and unyielding land. The only difference would be location and time period (well, the House Books started in the 1860s; I suppose you could say they overlap). And while the House books take place over several years, The Yearling happens inside one year. Wilder's family farmed on the plains of the mid west. The Baxter family farmed in woods and near swamps and bayous in the humid heat of Florida. However, many of the animals, bears, wolves, panthers, were the same; although the Baxters also had alligators to hunt. (Interesting caveat: Laura and Almanzo Wilder lived briefly in DeFuniak Springs, near my home town on the Florida Panhandle. The thick humidity drove them away.)

We see the Baxter family as they plant, hunt, get sick, endure hurricanes, and plague and we suffer with them. Reading The Yearling is truly a vicarious experience.

Like the Little House series, which are from the viewpoint of a child, Laura, the limited narrator in The Yearling is Jodi, a boy on the edge of puberty. The overall theme of the book is about Jody leaving childhood and entering into adulthood.

The Ingalls family may have had Native Americans to contend with, the Baxters had the Forresters, a wild, lawless, backwoods family that could be good friends or horrible enemies, often depending on how much they had to drink.

While the Little House books had their charm and poignancy and will always be a childhood classic, and also a classic for adults like me, The Yearling also has its place for sheer power in writing.

I found the descriptions of animals killing each other, killing the Baxter's cattle and the men killing bears and panthers to be disturbing, not because I think it was wrong, they had to do what they had to, I'm just glad we don't have to do that anymore.

And, of course, there is the Yearling. Jody's father had to kill the mother to treat a Rattle Snake bite. Something about the deer's liver drawing out the poison or so they believed back then. Anyway, that left an orphaned fawn. Jody takes the fawn home and it becomes his dearest friend, which is sad in its own way, because it reveals the isolation and loneliness a child can experience when he has no siblings or neighbors as companions.

Jody's mother is no Caroline Ingalls. Caroline had a quiet dignity, self-contained, and almost aristocratic, ladylike bearing. Ory or Ma Baxter, is as tough as leather. She buried five or six children. Jody is the only one to survive infancy. She's learned that it's hard to survive and all too easy to die. But she is not without her moments and every now and then her love for her husband, Penny, and Jody peek through.

The father, Penny, balances out his wife's pragmatic, no-nonsense, philosophy with compassion and wisdom.

While the fawn is mostly peripheral to the story, as the book progresses it creeps closer to the center of the story until he comes crashing down as the climax and centrifugal force that propels Jody into manhood. It is a painful life lesson and one that few people would want to learn today and I'm glad I can live a life of ease and grocery stores.

While some may consider this a boy's novel; I would almost consider it too dark for boys. I would not have read it to my son when he was Jody's age. He cried at the end of "Where the Red Fern Grows."

I'm grateful those hard lessons are not required anymore in my first world existence.

In conclusion? A fine, powerful novel, superbly written and fully deserving of the Pulitzer Peace Prize that it won in 1939.