Skip to main content

The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter

Originally published in March 2005, on my original 52 Books blog.

Year originally published: 1976

Read this a while ago.

The story: A basic coming-of-age story. In 1930, Little Tree, a boy who is part Cherokee and part white, becomes an orphan at age five. He is taken in by his Cherokee grandparents who bring him up in close touch with nature and teach him the ways of their people. He is briefly taken away and put in an orphanage where he is mistreated, but is able to return to his family after a while.

Technique and plot: The book is written in the simple, straightforward first person narrative style of a memoir, and sounds so honest that it’s easy to see why so many people believe(d) it to be non-fiction in spite of some rather unlikely events. Spellings reflect the speech patterns and accents of the people, but not so much that it makes the book difficult to read. Little Tree is very much a child of nature, and from it he learns lessons, both harsh and gentle, at the side of his grandfather. At times the book is very, very funny, other times uplifting and still other times sad. Parts of it ring so true that you whish it wasn’t a novel and the people were real, which is one of the things that have made this book so popular.

Rating: A lovely and somewhat fantastic coming-of-age story. 4+ stars.


SPOILER
are
you
ready
?
'cause
here
it
comes
 .
..
.


Disclaimer: Sometimes knowing too much about an author can spoil the reading of a book. This is one of those books, so if you want to research Forrest Carter, do it after you read the book.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more