Where the Red Fern Grows is a novel about a boy, Billy Coleman, and his two hunting dogs. It is set in the Ozark Mountains of northeast Oklahoma in the early 20th century. Billy is a 10 year old boy who lives with his family on a small farm He decides he wants a couple of hunting dogs and he works and scrimps and saves his money for two long years before he earns enough money to mail order his two dogs. At long last they come a male he names the male puppy “Old Dan” and the female “Little Ann.”  Billy, with the help of his grandfather, train the dogs to hunt raccoons, “coons.”

So soon Billy and his two dogs are out hunting coons every night. Billy gets very close to the dogs and they become a loyal and inseparable team and Rawls description of the growing love between the boy and his dogs is the best part of the book along with the descriptions of the rivers, creeks, mountains, valleys in the area. The raccoons don’t do as well though. You see Billy and his pups aren’t chasing them for the fun of it. Billy is making money by selling the hides and he is getting lots of them. He and his dogs become famous coon hunters and enter a local championship.

The book is a good read but it was written in 1961 treads upon modern sensibilities a little bit with the hunting scenes and the gory death scene. It has been made into a movie twice. Once in 1974 and then in 2003. I give the book three stars out of five.

The Ultimate Life by Jim Stovall is a novel about living, getting, and giving back. It is about a crusty old oilman named Red Stevens. Red is a multigazillionaire who has died and in his will he left the just a few gazillions to his greedy heirs and the bulk of his estate to a grandson, Jason Stevens. However Jason has to show that he has learned about the gifts of life and further demonstrate that that he knows how to teach others about the gifts

Well, old Red’s other heirs wanted all the gazillions of dollars and are thus trying to overturn Red’s last will and testament in court. The judge hearing the suit is the narrator and so he has to oversee the education of young Jason and test whether Jason is meeting the tests.

The gifts that Jason must learn are things such as Work, Money, Friends, Learning. There is a chapter for each. It opens with a court session where Jason demonstrates that he has learned what the particular day’s gift is and is then directed by the judge to go out and demonstrate that he learned how to teach that gift to others.

I loved the book. Mr. Stovall has a gift for writing and moving the story along. He also has a great sense of humor. The courtroom repartee between Jason’s lawyer and the greedy heirs’ attorney is really funny. He also writes with a gentle good humor and I just felt good by the time I finished the book. Mr. Stovall has a talent for showing how things like work, giving, gratitude, learning, and problems,  are really blessings to be learned and passed on.

This book tells the story, from the viewpoint of four women, of the siege of Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert, of nine hundred Jews, by the Roman army in the year 70 CE. The Jews had fled Jerusalem during a rebellion and they fled to a place that they thought would be safe.

The story is told by four women of widely different background. The thing that is common among them is that they worked in the dovecote. Which was used to provide both food for the community and fertilizer for the orchards.

I love Hoffman’s language and turns of phrase and the way she looks at things. It is a mixture of magic and realism. The story is wonderfully told although  I had trouble distinguishing the voices of the women as each told their story.

The story has more than fancy language though. It describes the brutal desert and rough way of life in a way that made me feel I was there. She tells the story of how the Jew’s faith bound everyone together and how women had to carve out their own space within that faith for their special needs.

The book is fascinating. I give it five stars.

I just finished “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. It is a wide ranging two generation type family history book. Lets just say that if you settle for who you can get rather than who you want sometimes the ramifications can go on for decades, especially if your write a therapeutic autobiography not for publication describing the situation in detail. For goodness sake don’t let the person you settled for get the therapeutic autobiography because then all crap breaks loose and even though the person you settled for is now the person you want, they may not want you any more and that is really bad therapy.

And the kids, oh yeah the kids. You can really screw the kids up royal especially if they turn out to be as big a jerks as you are.

I loved Franzen’s The Corrections, and I love this book also. Not very many others did. I got my copy in the remainder bin at Barnes and Noble. Really cheap.

Four stars out of five on this one for me.