Where the Red Fern Grows
| Written by: | Wilson Rawls |
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| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | |
| First published: | 1961 |
Where the Red Fern Grows is a 1961 novel about a boy named Billy Coleman and the adventures he has with his two coonhound dogs named Old Dan and Little Ann.
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Tropes used in Where the Red Fern Grows include:
- Asshole Victim: Rubin Pritchard.
- Awesome Moment of Crowning: When Billy receives the gold
cuptrophy for winning the championship coon hunt. - Bittersweet Ending: Billy's dogs die, one saving him and one from a broken heart and he is understandably heartbroken. When his family is moving away, Billy goes to say goodbye to his dogs. He sees a symbolic red fern growing on their graves which puts him at peace.
- Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: Billy's youngest sister and oldest sister have a couple of moments akin to this.
- A Boy and His Dogs
- Clutching Hand Trap: The book has something similar as a way to trap raccoons. You cut a small hole in a hollow log, drive some nails around it pointing down and inward, and place something shiny at the bottom like cut-up pieces of tin can. A raccoon passing by will be attracted, reach in to grab it, and catch its fist on the nails trying to pull it out. The narrator thinks his grandfather is teasing him when he first tells him this method, because all the raccoon would have to do is let go of the tin. But the grandfather assures him that a raccoon will never willingly let go of anything shiny. (After the narrator has caught one raccoon like this and can use its skin to train his hunting dogs, his father makes him pull the nails out of all his traps, because if raccoons are that serious about their tin then they don't have a sporting chance.)
- Death by Newbery Medal: How Old Dan and Little Ann meet their maker.
- Determinator: Billy, and how. He worked for two entire years to get that $50 to buy the pups he wanted.
- Dogs Are Dumb: Old Dan is a mild example. Lampshaded by Billy when he says, "It wasn't too hard for a smart old coon to fool Old Dan."
- Inverted with Little Ann. "...but there were none that prowled the river banks that could fool my Little Ann."
- Deus Ex Machina: The titular red fern.
- Family-Unfriendly Death / Karmic Death: Rubin Pritchard. It was so horrifying that the more graphic parts were edited out in some reprints.
- Old Dan's death is the former. Getting disemboweled by a mountain lion. Billy even mentions that on the way home from just barely surviving it, Old Dan's entrails were dragging on the ground behind him. Ewwwwwww.
- Heroic Dog: Old Dan and Little Ann die fighting off a mountain lion that was attacking Billy.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Rubin falls on his own axe and dies from it.
- Narm: Rubin's death in the movie, which was more of an in-universe Epic Fail than anything else.
- Platonic Life Partners: Old Dan and Little Ann.
- Sweetie Graffiti: Billy finds the names Dan and Ann carved in a heart on a tree and uses them as names for his dogs.