Good-Bye, My Lady

A story about a boy finding a rare basenji "laughing and crying" in the woods, and ... well, it's a proper book with a good deal of age to it.

No one really talks in writing like this anymore, it's a mess of words like "heah" instead of yeah and "howdied", and "som'n" which makes reading it quickly a mess of going back over these words. I've not seen the word Som'nt in a long long long time, if more than once.

I'd like to say I felt for the bond Skeeter has with Lady/Isis of the Blue Nile(what a name), but he is pretty easy to let her go and then switch gears to getting a hundred dollars worth of the reward. It's a very sharp change in the literature. An acceptance most kids simply do not have in them. Skeeter gives up and gives up hard show more and that's basically it.

To quote the book's weird speeches, reading this was brisk and slick as el'em. show less

4152 Good-bye, My Lady, by James Street (read 11 Apr 2006) Street was a well-known author back in the 1940s and 1950s, though I don't remember hearing of him. This is a boys' story, published as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941 or so and published as a book in 1954, telling of a boy in Mississippi swamp territory who lives with his uncle. They are dirt poor. The boy comes to find a dog--a Basenji (a breed I'd never heard of, which rarely barks but makes other noises)--and trains him and they become best buddies. Then he learns the dog belongs to somebody else, in Connecticut. The denouement is poignant in the extreme, and I was amazed at how taken I was by the story. It is the best dog story I have read in years.

Our teacher read this book to us in sixth grade--one chapter per day after lunch. We would beg her to read, "Just one more". I bought it on Ebay recently to see if it is as good as I remember. It is!

Cloying, dirge-like and sentimental with obvious bluntness, it's a different world where a child's main wish is to buy a shotgun and drink black coffee. Sidney Poitier looks bored in a bit part amounting to less than 7 minutes of screen time. The moment we hear of a movie about a boy and a dog, we expect a surfeit of sentimentality, a la "Old Yeller". Well, we get it. The mannered style of acting was already antiquated by the late 1950s, and the rhythms of speech were surely fashioned old, yes sirree. The jaunty, syruppy music doesn't help matters, seemingly just two minutes of the same turgid theme on a loop.