I’ve read this book maybe 20 times, and love it more each time. It’s such a comfort, although it is on the bleakest of topics. One of the first lines is “The land itself was desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit in it was not even that of sadness.” Yet, it makes me happy. It’s set within the Gold Rush era, everyone traveling on sleighs led by dogs. The main character of White Fang is a dog, well, technically a quarter dog. This dog, called White Fang, is forced from the wild into the world of people. As you can expect, this change results in an amazing story.
The imagery in this book is astounding and uses a range of vocabulary so it doesn’t get too repetitive. All of the characters are amazing, even if most of them are dogs, and make me happy. Even in the long and arduous parts of the book that most good writers wouldn’t be able to make entertaining, are. I may be a tad biased, but without spoiling, all I can say is the ending is one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a book. Everything about this book is good to me. I can’t say a single bad word about it, the writing is so good. It feels lyrical, but not in an overdone fashion, and it evokes emotions.
I will recommend this book until the day I die, but it isn’t for some people. It could be the style of writing, the topics it covers, anything. It was a staple of my childhood, and always will be, but it isn’t going to be that for others. So while I recommend this, and propose that you give it a shot, you don’t have to. No one else who has read this book loves it as much as me, so it’s probably just the history I have with it.