Dogsong Bookreport

Dogsong Book Report
                        Seth
    In the story Dogsong, the main character, Russel Suskit, is a14 year old Inuit Native American that is living out in an Eskimo village and wants to get away from his life in the village and takes a dog sled team to get away from everyone and his modern life and to find his own song of himself.   

    He decided to go on this long journey after his father sent him to an old man’s house to learn something from him. His name was Oogruk, and he had to tell an old story of his to Russel.  

    In Oogruk’s story, he says that in the past the Inuit had a song, that the song was in them and that it was them; but the song is now gone forever. He told him how people came into their village and took their song away and told them about hell. First the villagers started laughing because they didn’t understand what hell was. Then they explained that they should stop their singing and dancing and their song because the “demons from hell would strip their meat off”. So they gave up their songs. This was Russel’s quest to find the songs again. He needs to travel North without a gun or snowmobile, and use a dog team that Oogruk let him borrow with a spear and bow and arrows as his weapons.

    The next day, Russel started practicing hunting the old way with bow and arrows for some birds, but it took time because he didn’t understand what he was doing wrong. He couldn’t get any birds, but later in the story  he found out he needed to use his mind. He needed to attack with his arrow at the birds heart.

    So he sets off North with some food, his bow and arrows, a spear, and his dogsled team. He starts getting the hang of hunting things, when he can find any. A while later while he was on his journey, they run very low on food, and he and his dogs get very tired and hungry so he has to hunt and try to get meat and fat from an animal for them to stay warm and for them to have energy.

    While on the journey, he starts having strange dreams. One of them has a woman in it, and an older man, who had a quest of killing a giant mammoth. Then the next day, he comes across a pregnant woman freezing to death on the ground. Whether he can save her from freezing to death and being able to feed her as well as him and his dogs, and whether Russel finds his song is up to you to find out, by reading the book.

Critique:   The book has a very good plot and setting and the story moves at a decent pace throughout the story, even though it does get kind of boring now and then; and confusing with the whole song thing and all of the Inuit details that they talk about. The book is pretty good, and I would recommend the book to people who have read Gary Paulsen’s other books and people who like the outdoors and like being outside. It would have been a little more exciting if there was an enemy of Russel’s out on his journey, along with the conflicts he had. Overall, this was a pretty good realistic fiction story by a great author, Gary Paulsen.