![Ellie](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 12 12"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
My Rating For Dogsong WARNING : SPOILER ALERT My reading teacher gathered my group to the back table to discuss our new book. I seldom like the books the teacher picks out, and seeing that the title and front cover were hardly developed and thought over, I figured this would be another book that was violent, depressing, and honestly just frightening. I was certainly right regarding my prediction. After reading the first pages, I discovered that Russel wasn’t very friendly or talkative. He didn’t care for much of anything in his small village. Then, he goes to old man Oogruk’s house, and sits down while Oogruk tells him how to find his song after he felt that something wasn’t right. Russel is given an old dogsled, and he takes it on a small test drive around. Then, Oogruk passes away soon after. Russel does not cry or try to help, he just watches as his friend hopelessly sits by the ice. I feel that Russel is undeveloped and has no emotion whatsoever. Anyway, Russel continues on the ice, and falls asleep. Soon enough, he has a dream where he feels familiar with a man. I was confused enough, trying to visualize this dream. I couldn’t, because the whole book was not descriptive and used the same phrases repetitively. Back to the dream, as I see it that the man is Russel, I have trouble seeing that he had a past self older than he is in the present. I also refuse to believe that teenager Russel has had a past life, because it is obviously impossible. Trying to comprehend the story, I continued reading the spiral of boredom. Russel kills animals on his journey, which I feel is evoking children and teens to long for the “sensation” of poaching so they can find their own songs. If you want to find your song, look deep in your heart to find your own special power and don’t try to go out and run away killing animals and eating whatever you find. Although there is a hidden message in the story to embrace wildlife and the old ways, I think that Gary Paulsen has gone too far and has not thought about the evil things that he has put into his story. There is so much killing in this book, and Russel seldom cries about it. Seeing that the polar bear killed the happy dog, I figured Russel was going to cry, but of course,he didn’t. Need I say it once more, Russel is, by example, undeveloped and unemotional. It was right at the end when Russel spots a woman, dead, in the snow. I said to myself,”Not more violence! I can’t handle this!” I was expecting him to bury her or do some kind of ancient Alaskan sacrifice that I don’t understand on her. Of course, there are many crazy things for him to with her, and once again, Russel acts like it’s not catastrophic that he has just come upon a dead woman buried in the snow. So, Russel feeds and takes care of her. Didn’t see that coming. So, after a while, Russel finds out the woman’s name, Nancy, and finds out that she is going to have a baby. He becomes fond of her after noticing that she is the woman he was married to in the dream. When Nancy has her baby, back again comes the violence and depression. Russel places the baby on a snowy mountain after Nancy says she does not want to see it. I guess the baby ended up dying, which really just doesn’t make any sense why Paulsen even decided to put that bit about Nancy having a baby in there at all. Wouldn’t it just be better if Nancy wasn’t going to have a baby and Russel and Nancy became friends and got married? And couldn’t it be earlier in the book? What really disappointed me was that at the end, they take Nancy to the doctor. So, he did that whole run just to bring Nancy to the doctor? Thanks a lot for a massive waste of time.
