With
Donald Harington
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 The Toby Press
ISBN: 1592640508

How an abused dog & an abducted girl survive in the Ozark Mountains after the ogre dies.

With is a wonderful grown-up fairy tale, filled with villainy & vanity, innocence & ineptitude, humor & honor. It could have been miserable with meanness: after all Sog Alan is a killer, a drunk & a cop, & Robin Terr is a troubled girl who can tell a lie without turning a hair. & Hreapha? She breaks the cardinal rule of a dog's life: she runs away from her master.

Sog has a vision of what his retirement will be: snuggled away at the end of a dirt road on top of an oak-forested mountain with a little girl to keep him company, a storeroom stuffed with every thing he'll ever need, bought with the stash of cash he stole from the trunk of a dead drug peddler's car. He stalks his prey, the most beautiful girlchild in town, makes his snatch & vanishes.

Robin, realizing she's not going to escape back to her mother & her old life, learns how to survive. She is, after all, only a child & all the toys & clothes Sog has crammed into the spare bedroom seduce her. Sog is a bit of a worry: he drinks & has bad ideas about what he's going to do with her, however, he's also quite unwell, intent on making the homestead self-sufficient, & deep down inside, there's a spark of something of value.

Hreapha, the ugliest dog in creation, finds she is unable to survive on her own, & decides to go back to her master. When she finds him at the homestead, she warily gets to know the girl who at first, even though she's always wanted a dog, hates the sight of her. In time, all three will mellow out & forge a workable relationship until ... the master is overcome with illness, & the girl must do the most terrible thing the master has ever asked her to do, if she & dog are to survive.

Now any good story worth being called a fairy tale must involve spirits & ghosts, & sure enough, Madewell Mountain has its very own spirit, that of a 12 year-old lad who had to abandon the place many years before. In his own way he befriends dog & girl, & surviving evolves into thriving.

& so as this modern-day Eve grow ups, there are the amazing birthday gifts from the magical Hreapha: first a kitten (a bobcat cub) & then a fawn, a snake, until a menagerie calls Madewell Mountain home, & Robin learns to rule her brood of critters. With the help of a Bible & an 1888 encyclopedia Robin learns by trial & error. & the years shall pass & girlchild will grow into womanhood.

Donald Harington has crafted a story of immense charm. I could not put With down. I loved looking at life through the eyes of a dog, & meeting the in-habits. This author's resolution is both romantic & amusing. He has broken every rule imaginable about writing: verb tenses, dialects & thoughts in narratives ... so much so that the voices which inhabit this story throb with life.

Highly recommended for a scary & heartwarming story, which makes you wonder: how would I have survived, & does my dog think that way too?

Donald Harington has won the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, the Arkansas Fiction Award & was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999.

More from Donald Harington:
Some Other Place The Right Place
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
The Cockroaches of Stay More
Butterfly Weed & many more out of print!
(09/26/04)

Rebecca