Found this at a bookstore, it looked interesting enough. Spoilers ahead.
A boy named Jody is being raised on a farm in Florida. He and his family (father Penny and mother Ora) live there and one bad crop could mean starvation for the whole family. One day Jody gets to adopt a young fawn, which he names Flag. The duo grow up together and become inseparable, but when Flag starts to act as a deer does, wild, this will mean Jody has to make an impossible choice.
This book is just very frustrating. First things first, it feels very boring and same-y, and with a slow pace where easily fifty pages (or more) could've been cut due to how much repetition there is going on. Most of the book is just animal hunting, talk about keeping wild animals as pets or talk about the crops going wrong. There's some additional stuff in there, but most of the book feels kind of the same and the sluggish pace does nothing to help it.
The characters are frustrating as well. I genuinely liked almost nobody in this book. Jody is an annoying kid, Penny and Ora are bad parents, the Forester family beat up a guy just because he likes a girl they disapprove of him liking, there's a shitton of animal mistreatment by our main characters in this book, the list goes on. The only characters I found somewhat bearable were Flag (who is silent, of course) and Fodder-wing, the Foresters' disabled son who has a connection to animals and is Jody's best friend. Fodder-wing was kind of an okay character, but also he died early on before he could get any worse.
This book also features an uncomfortable amount of animal mistreatment and cruelty. Not just your average bits of it sprinkled in. It's like a consistent theme in the story. There's so many chapters dedicated to our main characters hunting and killing animals, keeping wild animals as pets (which is bad), or just generally mistreating them.
For the record, I don't have a problem with a hunt now and again as long as the animal's carcass is used well, or if they would only be killing animals as a form of self defense. But they constantly go out hunting and just generally mistreating these animals, and disrespect these wild animals for just acting out their natural behaviors. It gets very uncomfortable after a while. I don't even blame Flag for becoming unruly in the end; he's just a wild animal following his instinct who was raised in captivity by a boy who has no idea what he's doing. He's just a deer doing what a deer would do.
That aside, there's also an (albeit smaller) dose of stuff like sexism, racism and ableism in this book. The three classic "isms". I get that this is an older book, but some of these things were still wildly uncomfortable to read. Especially when it's our main characters saying this shit a lot of the time.
Finally, I also feel Flag could've been handled better. His relationship with Jody feels very forced (like it is because the plot demands it rather than any genuine connection these two have going on). Also Flag does not have a personality or anything. I know that this is a human-POV book and that Flag is silent, but you can have a silent animal side character and still give it, you know, an actual presence.
Give it a personality, give it likes and dislikes, gives it something. Because Flag feels more like a plot device and less like an actual character. He's just a deer. Could be any random deer. There's nothing really that makes Flag Flag, aside from being tame (but again, could be any tame deer). And since Flag and Jody are (supposed to be) the two central characters, I feel that Flag, and their relationship, should've been more developed.
So no, obviously I didn't like this book. It's by far not the worst I've ever read (hence why it doesn't have the lowest possible rating), but it's boring at best and rather uncomfortable at worst. I feel like I got nothing much out of this book other than annoyance at the characters, story and author.
Rating: 1.5/5
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