Shelly's Book Blog

I had difficulty getting started with The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt, perhaps because I knew it was going to be a sad book, filled with pain and heartache.
It is that, but it is also quite suspenseful toward the end, and really a very good story. The main characters are three cats (a mother and her two babies) and a dog named Ranger. The four animals become a family when the cats come to live under a house in the woods that is owned by the dog's owner, Gar Face, who is a truly evil man and mistreats Ranger. Another story involves magical characters who lived in the same woods about one thousand years before, giving the reader a sense of the forest's rich history and power. The writing is poetic and beautiful -- very different from other books I have read. I would probably not recommend this books to every child because the story unfolds slowly and the reader must be very patient -- just like the 1000-year-old snake who bides her time for that many years while buried in a jar under a giant tree. For those readers willing to stay with it, though, this book pays off well in the end.