For everyone who loves Sounder, Shiloh, and The Yearling, for everyone who loves the haunting beauty of writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, Kathi Appelt spins a harrowing yet keenly sweet tale about the power of love - and its opposite, hate - the fragility of happiness and the importance of making good on your promises. And one kitten’s one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning. Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. But they are safe in the Underneath…as long as they stay in the Underneath. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. Puck promises his mother, in her last moments, to find a way back to the Underneath and break the chain keeping Ranger prisoner. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. He is the son of the calico cat, and before she died, he and his sister Sabine were raised by Ranger and their mother in their close-knit, albeit unusual, family. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this cat, this feline, this creature he is supposed to hate. A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou.
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