Books like The Fox and The Hound

To anyone else thinking of reading this, It's not the Disney film most children grew up with. This isn't a bad thing, in fact it gives the novel much more poignant depth than the film ever had in its cutesy friendship theme, but if you're an animal-lover, I'd proceed with caution. The Fox and the Hound novel is also deeper in the sense that it highlights the intense cultural differences between the days of rural farm life and more developed 1960's society. The book begins in a world where hunting is less a sport and more a matter of survival and a way to make a living. As time goes on, the act of hunting becomes a way to settle an age-old vendetta. I'm not sure how to feel about that. It seems rather petty to vow to dedicate your entire life towards hunting down a fox that got your pet dog killed. But I guess if you're the town wino who spends most of your time hunting anyway, you've got nothing better to do. Unlike the burly lumberjack-esque hunters of most classic fiction, this novel also features a female hunter alongside the guy and his dog, which was interesting - although, again, she's not the same gentle old widow Disney painted her out to be. The Fox and the Hound was one of several books they pulled from the shelves at my elementary school (ironically they left Where the Red Fern Grows alone, and that was the one that had a dog getting disemboweled alive on a thorny tree branch). I'd grown up just assuming the novel was a slightly less childish version of the Disney film, so it was a whole new experience to see the differences between the two. What I liked about the novel is that, as dark as it was, it's not just a straightforward man-and-his-dog type story. It's a story of revenge getting out of control to the point of obsession. I'm not sure it was ever intended to be purely a children's story, since its themes seem to run more complex than that, and it seems like it would have scared most children. I would've hated this book if I were fifteen years younger.