The Underneath by Kathi Appelt - have you read this xenofiction?
Yes, I've read it
No, I've heard of it but haven't read it
No, I haven't read this or heard of it
Voting ended onOct 5, 2025
There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.
A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this cat, this feline, this creature he is supposed to hate. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath...as long as they stay in the Underneath.
Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten's one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning. For everyone who loves Sounder, Shiloh, and The Yearling, for everyone who loves the haunting beauty of writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, Kathi Appelt spins a harrowing yet keenly sweet tale about the power of love and its opposite, hate the fragility of happiness and the importance of making good on your promises.
[Goodreads]
This is a new blog, so reblogs for reach are appreciated! 🐱🐱🐶
This year I'm really trying to make more of an effort to mindfully consume media. Its difficult but my hope is that with perseverance I will learn how to better fill my time with what I find interesting, as opposed to doomscrolling. One thing I'd love to do is read more about the deep south. I live here and genuinely find the history and culture interesting, so I figure its a good place to start.
I read The Underneath by Kathi Appelt when I was a small child, don't remember how old, and it nestled itself into the roots of my psyche like a jar filled with coiled influence. I vaguely remembered the characters, the romance, the jealous grandmother, I remembered the mother cat and the old dog, and I remembered there being an alligator and a snake and a hawk.
What I didn't remember was how deeply the tone of the writing had ingrained itself in my mind. I also didn't remember the fates of all the characters. I just finished rereading it and crying, and I want so badly to be a writer like this.
A series of scenes from an unfinished story that I posted online a few years back was clearly influenced by The Underneath, but I had no earthly idea. I didn't remember where that part of me had come from. It's been a quiet influence.
A few really superb books this month and few very "meh" ones. Nothing truly appalling though so that's something. If you read nothing else though, consider reading This is How You Lose the Time War because man that book made me feel things, I knocked that one out in a day
(EDIT: I am feeling very self-satisfied, this has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks waiting for me to stop being lazy and post it and suddenly I have the entire internet backing up my assessment that Time War kicks complete ass. Go read it if you haven't, bigolas dickolas said so)
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
After reading Legends & Lattes last month I was really craving some more “cosy fantasy”. This one is obviously scifi instead, but it came highly recommend and it was exactly what I needed. It’s a pandemic lockdown novel and you can feel it, and I mean this in a very affectionate way. Everything from the characters, the narrative, to the tone feels rather healing now that we’re three years out from the initial covid outbreak.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a look at a world, not ours but an analogy of it, that had hit its industrial climate crisis and has since come out the other side. There are multiple catalysts, but one catalyst was the sudden sentience gained by the robots that they used. Not knowing how it was done but determined to allow the robots to self-determine, they allowed the robots to retreat into nature to find themselves, and they were left with the need to completely restructure their society without robotic aid. Humans stepped away from factories and manufacturing, and managed to recreate society — smaller scale, self-sufficient, and entirely based around the idea of existing in harmony with the natural world. Most of their planet has been left to re-wild itself, and humans keep to their own areas and focus on caring for their own communities.
The main character, Dex, is a travelling tea monk that feels a calling for something more, something different than what they’re doing. That calling leads them further into the wilderness than they have ever gone before and in doing so runs face to face with a robot who has come down from the mountains in an effort to see how humans are doing since the separation.
A Prayer For the Crown-Shy
A lovely sequel and conclusion for A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In this story, Dex and Mosscap descend from the mountains into human populated land so that Mosscap can continue its mission to learn “what humans need”. Along the way it learns how complex and varied that answer is, even for someone like Dex.
The Darkness Outside Us
I read this a little while ago but never got around to reviewing it. Honestly, I mostly found it disappointing and I couldn’t tell you why. I really enjoyed the other books I read by this author, but The Darkness Outside Us did not do it for me. I didn’t like the protagonist. I didn’t like the world it painted. I didn’t like Kodiac or the relationship it was trying to set up or how it was doing it. I don’t know, I can be picky with scifi though and I don't love amnesiac plots, so your mileage may vary, I have heard it highly recommended.
Two astronauts from opposite sides of a global cold war find themselves on an assignment together, travelling through space on a rescue mission. Ambrose wakes with no memory of the launch, and is surprised to find any sort of companion at all, never mind a surly, reclusive coworker who is determined to keep their countries’ animosity alive and well. He tries to ignore Kodiac and focus on the need to rescue his sister, but being completely alone with only an AI and a single companion on a dangerous mission makes that easier said than done.
Dear NOMAN v1
Sapphic manga with vaguely shonen adventure vibes. Don’t bother reading it, it’s mediocre at best and kinda squicky at worse. The main character is fourteen I think? And the romantic interest, a crow demon, very much is presented as an adult woman. I just can’t. The story itself isn’t very interesting either, as the girl gets recruited into a vaguely Bleach-rip-off style ghost hunting job, but the relationship is just. No. Untenable. Moving on.
Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark // Sunset of the Sabertooth
I found myself rereading this to kids and honestly they really are just excellent, fun little introductions to chapter books. No notes, still charming. Love Jack and Annie and their ability to use books to travel through time.
Doctor Who: Scratchman
EXCELLENT read. A novel spin off of a show can always be hit or miss (see the Torchwood book coming up) but this one really knocked it out of the park. Tom Baker, unsurprisingly, has a great handle on the Fourth Doctor’s character voice, and the way he wrote Sarah and Harry is completely delightful. I’ve only seen a bit of the Fourth Doctor so this is actually my first intro to Harry, and it made me fall completely in love with this dingus.
This book felt like it knew what it should be: a fun adventure — occasionally tense, often funny — that isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. It fit very naturally into the world as a good, solid, simple Doctor Who adventure. The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry are intending just to stop for a break and a picnic, but soon find themselves doing their best to protect a host of villagers against an invading force of evil, skeletal scarecrows that are attempting to infect the humans around them. A necessary plot point is understanding how phone party lines work and this delighted me more than I can say for a book published in 2019.
Torchwood: Something In The Water
Meh. In the spectrum of Torchwood novels this falls smack dab in the middle. Not atrocious but certainly not good. It had instances I really quite enjoyed, the beginning was pretty fun, and there was a lot of promise to it, but reading about a fatal and rapidly-spreading respiratory infection that requires a government response hits VERY differently post-pandemic. Maybe it would have felt more believable or enjoyable in 2008, but when you know what a global response actually does/should look like? It ends up taking a book that should have really been Owen’s time to shine and just made him look like an absolute fucking moron. It was disappointing. I would secretly love to see it rewritten because it had potential, it had so much potential. Tosh was the only character with half a brain in the whole novel, god help her.
The Sprite and the Gardener
I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, ever since I found out that original comic that circulated tumblr was being developed in a fully fledged story. And it’s so worth reading, the art is stunning. The story is sweet, and every page is just such a pleasure to look at, I can’t get over the colour palette.
Before, caring for plants was the task of sprites... but that was before humans appeared and begin to carefully and rigidly cultivate them. Now sprites have little to do... except Wisteria finds herself enamored by one young gardener who is trying so hard but continuously failing to bring life to her dead little garden.
This is How You Lose The Time War
I was skeptical about this one because, again, I’m picky about my scifi and often don’t love time travel stories (ignore all the Doctor Who…) But this was one of the best books I read this month, easily. It’s a very quick read, and it’s more poetic imagery than heavy duty scifi. It feels like a pure example of the truly romantic love letter genre blasted into the future.
If you read any book from this list, I would recommend this one. It was so delightfully different from anything else I’ve read in a while.
EDIT: to allow the much more influential voice have a say:
Doctor Who: Time Lord Fairytales
Pure fun. This book is composed of various twisted fairytales all set in the Doctor Who universe. Some involve the Doctor, others borrow species, characters, or props. I had the audiobook of this and my mother, who knows almost nothing about Doctor Who, ended up listening to it and enjoying it immensely just as scifi-flavoured fairytales.
The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
I’ve been meaning to read this book for years and finally got around to it. It was a really fun middle grade read! If you liked Holes this hits a similar notes in the way it weaves a number of seemingly disconnected stories and histories together into a single narrative.
In part the story is about two raccoons who take over as the Sugar Man Swamp Scouts, who have the job of listening for Intelligence and to wake the Sugar Man in case of emergency. In another part, it’s about a boy who is trying to help his mom save their little cafe on the edge of the swamp. In part it’s about a conniving businessman and his alligator-wrestling colleague attempting to profit off the swamp. In part it’s about a grandfather who loved his grandson, his swamp, and wanted nothing more than to take a picture of a woodpecker.
The Underneath
I wanted to read another book by this author after reading True Blue Scouts (and Maybe a Fox, which a few years back) but this one didn’t do it for me. It was a fine book, and a fine animal adventure, but the pacing just felt like it dragged too much to really keep me interested. I could have finished it if I’d really wanted to, but there were other things I wanted to move on to more. If you feel like a rather melancholic, somewhat mythological middle grade animal story though you’d probably quite enjoy it.
Like True Blue Scouts, The Underneath weaves together a number of different stories, including one about a mythical snake and her daughter, a hateful isolated man, an old injured dog, and a mother cat. The dog, who stepped in front of his master’s gun at the wrong moment, is now kept chained in the yard and spends most of his time hiding beneath his master’s house. He was lonely and isolated… until a mother cat joins him and ends up giving birth to her kittens. They’re now both devoted to caring for the kittens, and trying to protect them from the horrible master in the house above.
So in the run up to Christmas I’m doing a count-down (well, a count-up). Twelve days of books! But just like the song, I’m going to increase the number of books each day, with a theme. I’ll link the previous posts on each new one, but if you’d like to follow along I’ll also be tagging them ‘hermitknut’s bookmas’.
On the Tenth Day of Christmas... animal friends.
Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee gives us Jules, who loses her sister, and a little fox that is born at just the right time. A smoothly written exploration of grief and the way people handle it, with a touch of magic thrown in.
Animorphs by K. A. Applegate... where do I even start? This series was absolutely life-changing for me. I started reading when I was six and am only finally getting to the end now, twenty years later. Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias are five kids who (along with their Andalite friend Ax) have the power to morph into different animals - in order to fight the Yeerk invasion. Hilarious, bizarre, vivid and emotional.
A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne M. Harris is a blend between myth and revenge fantasy and I really enjoyed it. The nameless protagonist, a young woman with formidable magical power tied to the wildlife around her, falls in love with an ordinary human man. But he doesn’t, in the end, live up to it - and she turns on him. Some of the sequences are almost hypnotising.
Bête by Adam Roberts imagines that animal rights activists place AI tech inside animal skulls. In response, society kind of semi-collapses. Reminded me quite a bit of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; it’s funny and sharp, but pretty grim too.
The House on Hummingbird Island by Sam Angus tells us Idie’s story. She inherits a house in the caribbean when she is twelve, and goes to live there - making a number of friends, animal and human - and figure out the mystery of her mother’s death. Interesting book, very good at portraying the setting.
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman is something I don’t want to spoil for anyone, as it’s one of the biggest new releases this year. But suffice to say: I didn’t think Pullman could pull off the quality of His Dark Materials again. But he has. I was swept away by this one, and I can’t wait for the next.
The Boy, the Bird and the Coffin Maker by Matilda Woods is about a boy who escapes his abusive father with the help of bird, and hides out with a former toymaker (now a coffin maker) who lost his family. It’s magical in places and very fairytale-esque; charming.
Sabriel by Garth Nix is one of my favourite female-led fantasy stories. Sabriel’s father is the Abhorsen, a sort of reverse necromancer, and in his absence Sabriel has to step into his shoes. On the way she picks up the drily sarcastic Mogget, a talking cat who is almost certainly something much more sinister... if you’d only dare to take off his collar. Brilliant.
The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis is chronologically the first book in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ and absolutely my favourites. The origin of Jarvis, Professor Digory as a child with his friend (who is excellent), the creation of Narnia - not to mention the talking horse, the cabby and his wife - I’ve always liked this one better than any of the others in the sequence.
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb is finely tuned blend of the best of the slow, Tolkien-paced, heavy description type of fantasy with a more contemporary approach to character, action, and politics. Fitz, the illegitimate son of a prince is brought to grow up in the keep that his grandfather rules - after his father’s abdication. His position at court is a dangerous one, and made no safer by his training as an assassin. He also has a much maligned ability - the Wit - which allows him to communicate, to a degree, with animals. Hobb’s work is incredible.
Previously:
On the First Day of Christmas… my favourite book of all time.
On the Second Day of Christmas… books about people exploding.
On the Third Day of Christmas… the very biggest fans.
On the Fourth Day of Christmas… books about princesses.
On the Fifth Day of Christmas… memory is everything.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas… serial killers abound.
On the Seventh Day of Christmas… women growing wise.
On the Eighth Day of Christmas… dragons are people too.
On the Ninth Day of Christmas… the gods are among us.
