Book Review: The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt, published May 6, 2008, a John Newbery Honor book, ALA Notable Children's Book and a National Book Award Finalist. Lexile 830 (matches to 5th grade), 320 pages. Recommended for 10-14 with a caution re: animal and alcohol abuse, or grades 5-9. Please note: this book is not yet in the pageturner library and will require student purchases for books to be purchased.

In my review of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I discussed the 6 predominant qualities of a great novel (which I’d borrowed from a YouTube video).  One of those is "transcendence."  This novel is deeply lyrical and poetic, concerning humanity’s biggest issues: family, love, cruelty, and loss.  Although intended for tweens, it’s also a great read for adults. It is indeed transcendent, intertwining what’s mystical with reality, perhaps comparable in that way with Moby Dick (1)--a genuine rarity in a debut novel. Although Appelt has written more than 40 books, mostly in graphic format, none has met with the success--and vicious backlash--as did The Underneath. (2)

Our protagonist is a hunting hound named Ranger, stolen as a puppy by a violent man who’s claimed an abandoned hovel in a bayou between Texas and Louisiana.  The man was subjected to extreme violence by his father, who so destroyed his face as a child he is now known only as Gar Face. (3). Gar had accidentally shot Ranger some time before, when he’d prevented Gar Face from killing a bobcat he’d intuited had kittens.  After that, Gar Face chained him up, restricting him to a 20-foot circle.  The bullet remains in Ranger's front leg, where sometimes it burns still.

A pregnant calico cat has been abandoned in the forest and hears Ranger’s baying, mournful song. They become fast friends and together teach her newly born twin kits to stay in “the underneath,” beneath the decaying house. Only there will they be safe.

Meanwhile, an ancient creature, captured for a thousand years in a huge clay jar, feels her imminent release and revenge.  She is thousands of years old and her story uncoils slowly throughout, a reflection of the mythical snake she will prove to be. (4)  This myth of Lamia intertwines with a story of an indigenous tribe, the Caddo (5), who’d lived in that bayou so long ago.   We will also meet a descendant of the Egyptian god Thoth, who’d taken on human form to love Lamia’s daughter, Night Song, during that era when the Caddo still  lived there. (6) So now we have three supernatural beings and soon, a fourth, the daughter of Hawk Man (Thoth) and Lamia’s daughter. When she is 10, their girl loses both parents and is lost.  We will find her again at the end although she flits throughout, seen and acknowledged but unrecognized-- for what and who--she is.

It's a story full of portents, repeated as by a Greek chorus, laden with significance. (7) The foreshadowing is dramatic, its rhythms, poetry. But there are hilarious moments, too, as when Puck (8), the boy twin kitten, suddenly discovers his capacity to frighten predators with his newly minted YEEOWL! Later, he attempts to cross a creek on a log, only to be submerged when it rolls. And he’ll try to cross through the trees after watching squirrels, but he just can’t bring himself to go FAST, as they do, and flummoxes himself.

The forest is as alive as its denizens are, and as sentient. Appelt presents the fungal network by which trees connect with each other (9) as also a repository of ancient history and wisdom.  She respects that animals may be as moral, or more, than we are.  I found these concepts to be genuinely comforting--and they comport with recent new science. (10)

There are so many points to give pause, in this story, and so many lessons to be absorbed intuitively.  We are horrified when Gar Face smashes Ranger's face with a wooden board, which is viscerally described--because Ranger is so good and utterly undeserving of such cruelty.  But we don't feel sorry for Gar Face, who received even more brutal treatment from his father, breaking his skull--because Gar Face is irredeemably evil.  But Gar Face wasn't born evil, he was made that way by the very person who should've loved and protected him--why don't we feel THAT?  

Lamia, too, betrays her own daughter because she doesn't want to be alone; she's responsible for Night Song's death, and she would repeat that experience with her granddaughter, if she could.  She's redeemed by her final act, and her granddaughter comes to her then, with love. So we learn that even someone who's chosen evil for thousands of years can make a different choice and be loved again. We might be terrified of a hundred-foot alligator but he is neither good nor evil, merely an ancient force of nature surviving still--with, as it happens, something of good humor and even wisdom.  And the trees are good--nature's appointed representatives-- because they hold the memories of lives past and present, of extinguished species and the natural history of the world. 

We learn that a snake woman and a bird man can love each other unstintingly, even to dying, and that families are not only born but also chosen, and can be comprised of beings who don't look alike--and may not even be the same species. We learn that love can be  enduring and boundless. We learn, too, that we can survive more than we believe we can; we can thrive within our chosen families despite terrible odds. 

The book ends with the extended family of dog and cats finally together again-- physically weakened, yes, and missing one mom, but stronger than ever in their love for each other; sometimes in real life, that’s as much as we get.  Most of the time, as here, it’s plenty enough. By their tweens, I'm confident kids can fully understand that.

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 1) Author Appelt has said she partly took inspiration for The Underneath from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book for its use of mythical themes, as did Herman Melville in Moby Dick. The Underneath actually began as a true short story, in which her son rescued a cat from a creek while camping.  Later, she expanded the story to include the Greek myth of Lamia, and the Egyptian god Thoth.  You can read an interview with Appelt, here: https://journals.ala.org/index.php/cal/article/view/6900/9286

 2) In 2009 one reviewer described The Underneath as “violent and controversial.”  That reviewer wrote, “What were the Newbery and National Book Awards judges thinking when they named this novel a finalist for their prizes? That kids don’t see enough repulsive characters in other media and needed a book about two more? Or that they have to get their New Age twaddle early so that they’ll recognize it when they see it in The Secret?... [O]ne aspect of The Underneath that may have appealed to judges isn’t a virtue: It touches many ideologically fashionable bases. These include the idea that animals (and, in this book, other forms of nonhuman life) are morally superior to people… [S]entimental New Age goop, pitched to an age in which environmentalism often becomes substitute religion.”  See: https://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/kathi-appelt’s-violent-and-controversial-2009-newbery-and-national-book-award-finalist-‘the-underneath’/  I’ve included this review for your judgment; apparently it sparked quite a lot of hate mail directed at Appelt. She even ranted about the dust jacket!

To my mind, this reviewer clearly had an ax to grind as an arch- conservative and was merely pitching her political spin, although I do agree that a tween who suffered from reading Charlotte’s Web shouldn’t read The Underneath--but I don’t know of any! I read Charlotte’s Web to my kids when they were 4 and 6, and they were fine with it.  

(3) The alligator gar is a long-nosed member of the pike family and is among the largest freshwater fish in North America. Although commercial fishing exists in some southern states for this creature, they are devilishly hard to catch. Gar flesh is described as “tasty,” but their eggs are toxic. You can see one in the first 29 seconds of this 4-minute YouTube video:  https://youtu.be/iT7LcOsfsfo?si=FcD9x5NXT3iJsct8

 4) This creature will be Lamia. Lamia appears in Greek mythology as early as the 6th century BCE.  Around 460 to c. 380 BCE, Aristophanes wrote she’d been queen of Libya, beloved of Zeus. Lamia was doomed because of his spectacularly jealous wife, Hera, who represents the subconscious male dread of woman scorned or cheated.  So, in one of her famous fits of pique, Hera subsequently stole and destroyed the children of Lamia’s union with Zeus.  In her terrible grief, Lamia began to steal any children within her power and destroy them.  Later, the Greeks morphed her into a sea-monster, with the lower body of a snake; in The Underneath she appears as a gigantic cotton mouth snake.  Sometimes her body resembles the griffin, with parts taken from various other animals.  Lamia epitomizes hyper-masculinity’s extreme fear of women in charge of offspring, as exemplified in Trump’s repeated lies that women are birthing full term infants they immediately have killed. 

(5) “The first primary inhabitants around Caddo Lake were the Caddo Indians. The Caddo Nation is a confederacy of several Native American tribes who historically inhabited much of what is now East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The Caddo Nation is thought to have lived in this area of the south as early as 200 BC and by the year 800 had begun to coalesce into the Caddoan Mississippian culture…During the 18th century, the Spanish and the French were both contending for the territory occupied by the Caddo Nation and the brunt of these contentions fell upon the Indians...In 1835, the Caddo nation signed a treaty with the U.S. government and were relocated to Binger, Oklahoma. Today, the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe with its capital at Binger and there are nearly 5,000 enrolled members of the nation.” From: https://caddolakeinstitute.org/overview/a-history-of-caddo-lake/

(6) “Thoth was worshipped throughout Egypt as a moon god and the patron of science, literature, wisdom, and invention. Endowed with complete knowledge, Thoth invented all the arts and sciences as well as arithmetic, surveying, geometry, astronomy, soothsaying, magic, medicine, music (including wind and string instruments), drawing, and writing. The infinite powers attributed to him by his followers inspired the name of Thoth—the thrice great.”  Thoth was most often depicted as an ibis, a bird sacred to Africa.  You can see an ancient carving of an ibis, here: https://egyptianstreets.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Ibis.jpeg

(7) The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.

(8) Puck is a character in William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. He’s a whimsical character central to the plot, a master of magic and mischief who delights in wicked good humor. Appelt’s kitten is aptly named! 

(9) I highly recommend these excellent non-fiction works on trees and recently discovered evidence of their deep connections; I’ve read all of them and hunger for more. The best of the best:  Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard.  A close second: The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben. And an interesting exploration of tree diversity: Around the World in 80 Trees: Discover the Secretive World of Trees, by Jonathan Drori.
 
(10) In this 2020 photo we see an orangutan, one of a critically endangered species, on a preserve in Borneo, extending a hand to a warden clearing snakes in a muddy creek.  When first published, it was claimed that the man had fallen in, and the orangutan was offering a hand to help him out.  Later it was learned that the man and orangutan knew each other and that maybe the orangutan was merely asking for food.  One way or another, it does show a cross-species relationship I find hopeful, when hope is increasingly hard to find. https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/200207125744-01-borneo-orangutan-man-snakes-restricted.jpg?q=x_0,y_0,h_1687,w_2997,c_fill/h_653,w_1160/f_webp