Sounder

An unnamed Black sharecropping family in the rural South survives on almost nothing until the father, driven by his children's hunger, steals a ham from a white man's smokehouse, a theft that ends with deputies arresting him at gunpoint and shooting the family's loyal coon dog, Sounder, as he lunges to protect his master. Sounder survives with permanent injuries, dragging a mangled leg and jaw, and disappears into the woods for months before eventually returning home, altered and quieter than before. The father is sentenced to hard labor and sent to a series of distant work camps, and across several years the boy at the center of the story sets out on his own, again and again, walking long distances alone to search for wherever his father has been moved, encountering casual cruelty from white authorities at every stop. Along the way he meets a kind Black teacher who takes him in and teaches him to read, opening a path out of the illiteracy his family's poverty has trapped them in. The father finally returns home years later, permanently crippled by an accident at a quarry, and both he and the aged Sounder die within the same short stretch of time, the father from his injuries and Sounder simply from age and exhaustion. The boy, grown by the book's end, has become literate and determined to build a different life than the one his family was allowed.

Reading it is spare and unadorned almost to the point of austerity, its prose stripped down the way its family is stripped of nearly everything, including, pointedly, names for any of the human characters; only the dog is ever called by name, a choice that sharpens rather than softens the story's argument about whose dignity the world around this family refuses to recognize. It is short and reads quickly, but its flat, unsparing tone makes it one of the bleaker books on any Newbery list.