Four Month Friend - Softcover

Clymer, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0590425455 ISBN 13: 9780590425452

Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks, 1991

Synopsis

Staying with her uncle on his California farm, nine-year-old Dani feels unwelcome and unloved while she tries to come up with a plan to save her pet goat Tyler from the butcher

About this title

From School Library Journal

Grade 3-5-- Saving the life of her pet goat becomes nine-year-old Dani's summer project. On farms like her uncle's, where she has been deposited for a year while her parents are in Europe, male goats are sold for butchering when they reach the age of four months. Believing the goat to be her one and only companion, her stake in his survival takes Dani's emotions to a near-explosive level, causing friction between her and her relatives. Too much is going on in this novel, resulting in choppy transitions from one chapter or incident to the next. Characters' motivations are murky: cousin Clorissa's resentment of Dani is believable, but her cruel name-calling is not; Uncle Walter agrees to take Dani in, but is callous and indifferent to her needs. It's also hard to accept that Dani's parents would leave her behind for such a long time. At times, the prose reads like a creative writing primer, and the similes fly thick and fast. In one page, Dani feels "like a can of soda that had been shaken and then opened" and "her excitement seeped out of her like a pricked balloon." Readers who stick with this novel will sympathize with Dani, but the theme of children left with rural families has received more believable and eloquent treatment in Byars' The Midnight Fox (Viking, 1968), and Nilsson's If You Didn't Have Me (McElderry, 1987) .
-Martha Rosen, Edgewood School, Scarsdale, NY
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0590425455
• ISBN 13: 9780590425452
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Rabinowitz Sandy
• Number of pages: 140