Written by Terry Lee Caruthers, RED AND ME is a young adult novel that belongs to another time. The setting is rural Tennessee, sometime in the 1930s. Marlene is a ten-year-old, ever-so-slightly tomboyish girl living in a tin-roofed shack with her mother, father, and younger brother Silas. One day she sees a stray dog “the color of rich Tennessee clay mud” running down the street that she is determined to have as her own. There is something Dorothy-esque about Marlene. Old enough to reason but not quite old enough to reason well, she imagines all sorts of calamities in which her life and Red’s (that’s what she calls the stray) intertwine again and again. This stymies her efforts to call the wayward creature her own, and her father balks at having a (literally) flea-bitten dog in the home before relenting. Her nemesis is Mr. Arthur, whose cruelty extends to throwing rocks at Red and who vows to kill him for rooting through his trashcans.
Carruthers’s authorial voice is clear, commanding, and authoritative. As the novel is told in the first person and from the perspective of a child, it is particularly important to get the tone right—and Carruthers succeeds brilliantly in giving Marlene a distinctive voice. Her pronouncements not only exude personality but evoke the period, too. A passing illness is glossed as “puniness,” for example, and she “plumb” forgets things. There are many more Southern expressions besides, all of which (no less than the author’s keen eye for mundane details) help bring the period to life. In her attempts to gain the dog’s trust, Marlene learns patience and perseverance—as well as the need to stand her ground.
In terms of tone, RED AND ME owes much to the rich vein of children’s literature exemplified by early twentieth-century writers such as Helen Fuller Orton. But it also evokes earlier literature in another way: the relative smallness of its vision. No one in it saves the world or goes through wretched tribulations. It’s a simple, straightforward story—a touch derivative, perhaps, but charmingly told. That is a rare enough thing these days, but Carruthers pulls it off with some élan.
Terry Lee Caruthers’s RED AND ME is a charming, innocent tale of childhood in an America gone by—as well as a heartfelt paean to the relationship between humans and dogs.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader