Full spoilers for the entire book below. Proceed with caution.
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Title: Weasel
Author: Cynthia DeFelice
Publication Date: 1990 (novel), 1998 (audio)
Publisher: Atheneum (novel) and Recorded Books, LLC (audio)
Narrated By: Jeff Woodman
Recording time: 2 hrs, 36 mins
THE PLOT
In 1839, deep in the Ohio wilderness, Nathan Fowler, 11, experiences a major life change when his father goes missing. On the sixth day of his father's absence, a mute man arrives to the family cabin where he and his younger sister are awaiting their dad's return. The mute man is bearing their father's locket, so they take this as a sign that the man wants them to travel with him and that their father will be at the end of the trip.
The two children travel with the man and learn, when the man writes it down, that their quiet companion is named Edgar. Along the way, they encounter another man at a distance - Weasel. Weasel is a murderous local legend, known for his cruelty. The party eventually arrives to Edgar's home and find their father there, injured. He had stepped on a cleverly hidden trap and the injury was not infected. As Edgar and Nathan's younger sister use medicines to treat the children's injured father, Nathan realizes that he needs to return home to feed their animals and to bring both family horses back to this cabin so their father can have a way to travel home.
Edgar is nervous to let Nathan travel alone, due primarily to the looming threat posed by Weasel, but decides to give the boy a stick weapon, used by the Shawnee tribe, and to let him go. When Nathan arrives at his home, he discovers that most of their animals have been killed. He knows Weasel must have done it. He sets off to return to Edgar's cabin. On the journey, he is accosted by Weasel. Not knowing whether the other man intended to kill him, or not, the boy throws the Shawnee stick weapon at the killer. Then things go black.
When Nathan wakes, he is in Weasel's cabin and tied up. He learns that the killer has their horses and that Weasel stole his father's gun after catching him in the animal trap. Weasel then tells Nathan about his shared history with Edgar. The two men were assigned by the U.S. government to remove the Shawnee tribe to Kansas and Oklahoma, though he says killing them was as good or better than getting them to leave. Weasel explains that when Edgar decided he did not want to do the work anymore, and that he married a Shawnee woman, renouncing his prior life, Weasel killed the man's new wife, their unborn child, and then cut out Edgar's tongue.
Nathan concocts a plan to escape. He gets the man to untie him, so that he can use the bathroom, and then when he is retied, he attempts to strain his arms in a way that will allow for some slack. The scheme works. When Weasel falls asleep later, Nathan escapes his bonds, takes back his father's gun from the sleeping man, and holds Weasel at gunpoint while he flees on one of the two horses the man had stolen from his family.
He rides directly to Edgar's cabin where he meets his now healed father, as well as his younger sister and Edgar. The family returns home and thanks Edgar for his help. In the weeks that follow, Nathan is consumed by regret over not killing Weasel when he had the chance, and a desire to go back and kill the man. In February, he sneaks away with his father's gun and returns to Weasel's cabin, only to find that the murderer has been dead for a long time. Distraught, he travel's to Edgar's cabin and relays what he now knows. The two of them return to Weasel's cabin and bury him. Nathan then returns home to tell his nervous and angry father what he did, and what he found.
As the novel ends, Edgar moves west to find his late wife's Shawnee family, hoping to find peace and a new life with them in Kansas. After a town celebration, where he sees a local fiddler, Nathan decides he wants to learn to play.
REACTION
Weasel is a short, but well-written children's historical fiction novel (9-12) that won a bunch of awards after it was published. I listened to the novel via Audible, and Jeff Woodman's audio narration was excellent. I am very happy to have re-read it and I encourage everyone who is old enough and mature enough for the material to pick it up.
ALA Notable Children's Book
An American Bookseller Pick of the Lists
A School Library Journal Best Book
A Notable Children's Book in the Field of Social Studies
Winner of the Oklahoma Sequoyah Award Children's Book
Winner of the South Carolina Children's Book Award
Although I did enjoy the book, I do have some thoughts and critiques.
After reading Weasel as an adult, I am squeamish about its targeted age range (9-12.) The novel's antagonist is a government agent turned serial killer and though the story does not go into graphic detail about how his murders were done, the readers are confronted by the non-graphic recounting of one particularly horrible murder. Should a nine year old read that a man was forced to watch, while tied up, as his pregnant wife and their unborn baby were murdered - just before having his own tongue cut out to keep him quiet? The author is careful in how this information is presented, but carefulness can only go so far. Presenting this plot at all, to a nine year old, felt like it went too far to me. That said, the 20th century was a much different time in this respect. The movie Jaws, for example, was rated PG.
Thematically, the story focuses on the young protagonist learning to deal with fear, the loss of innocence, and his desire for revenge. I thought DeFelice did a great job of putting us into the mind of a not-quite young adult, on the edge of civilization, feeling these emotions, throughout the book. By the end of the story, young Nathan has come to realize that revenge would not have made him feel better. He desires, going forward, to learn the fiddle so that he can give the people he knows positive emotions. Though the plot was pretty stark, I thought DeFelice did a really nice job tackling the topic of Nathan's character development and showing that his simplistic desire for vengeance was not a good desire. Though this lies on the darker side of character development, overcoming a base desire for revenge, when wronged, is something all people go through.
One gripe I had with the plot is that the author paints a wildly negative general picture of white settlers on the American frontier, Daniel Boone in particular, and probably a too rosy picture of the Native tribes that they encountered. This is not a core part of the plot, per se, but it is the backdrop for the story. It's not just that Weasel is an individual who is evil (there were undoubtedly real life stories like this one), it's that the presence of white settlers on the frontier, at all, is presented as a bad thing. Mass migration is, and always has been, fraught with complex and competing moral arguments. It's driven by complex and competing motivations. Acknowledgment of how messy the history is should be part of the education on the topic. I don't mind anyone landing on a particular side of the issue, but there is a difference between picking one side in a debate and acting as though there is no debate.
Of course, I have the benefit of applying this critique from a distance of more than three decades. In the 1990s, at the time of the publication of the book, the artistic and media depiction of Native Americans was in full churn, with the mid 20th century "cowboys and Indians" popular culture not far in the rear view mirror. Weasel, at the time it was written, was part of a wider pushback in the opposite direction, encompassing literature, film, and television. Weasel is a product of its time and I think it would be unfair to hold that against the author. Nevertheless, it still leaves a present-day reader (or the parent of a reader) with some decisions to make. I guess my advice would be that if you give this book to a child, you might make an effort to communicate some of the historical complexity after, as you discuss the story.
Overall, criticisms aside, I liked the book. I have always enjoyed rural frontier America as a literary setting and DeFelice does an excellent job of placing her readers in that environment. I also appreciated how she handled her protagonist's emotional character arc. Given the novel's subject matter, I recommend that you be judicious in deciding to give this book to a child, but I have no hesitation in recommending it to an adult.
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