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Paintings from the Cave: Three Novellas
Meet Jake who lives in a neighborhood controlled by street violence and fear. He meets a sculptor across the street, and his eyes are opened to another world. Or Jojo,who's closer to her three dogs than to her foster family. When Jojo tries to help another girl who needs a friend, the dogs know what to do. Or Jamie, Erik, and Grandpa, who make up an unusual family.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
29 people are currently reading
810 people want to read
About the author
Gary Paulsen
418 books4,051 followersGary James Paulsen was an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, best known for coming-of-age stories about the wilderness. He was the author of more than 200 books and wrote more than 200 magazine articles and short stories, and several plays, all primarily for teenagers. He won the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 1997 for his lifetime contribution in writing for teens.
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January 22, 2026
"You can't learn anything talking 'cause you're just saying stuff you already know. You've got to be quiet to learn."
—Paintings from the Cave, P. 32
Gary Paulsen starts right off in this book by dealing with some heavy issues in the opening "Note from the Author". He mentions the dark nature of his own youth, and admits that when he was a kid it was only literature and dogs that allowed him to see the light of hope in his life just enough to give him reason to keep moving forward toward that day when he would be free of his parents and could begin building his own version of a life. More than just acknowledging the deprivations of his own childhood, though, Gary Paulsen talks about the times when kids who have come to listen to him speak at author events ask him hard questions about what one is supposed to do when home life gets so bad that there isn't any visible light at the other end of the tunnel, no reason to think that there's anything waiting up ahead but more shame and misery. As in the three short stories that make up Paintings from the Cave, Gary Paulsen doesn't try to answer these questions with glib sentiments of hopefulness that any kid out on the streets will see through in a New York minute. He recognizes that in many cases, when their lives are really, really bad, it's not enough to tell them that it's just a matter of marking time, waiting out the years to age eighteen so that they can finally embark on a journey to find their own destiny. When things are too bad to see even the next day, or the next week, years of suffering is too much to handle. No matter how earnestly one tells an abused and afflicted child to wait out the storm because there will be a better tomorrow arriving eventually, it doesn't fix the right now, this very moment when they need release from the horrors of their life more than they can even imagine needing anything else. Sometimes tomorrow is too long to wait for relief from the pain, whatever its cause, and this concept of emotional vulcanism is the driving force behind the three stories in Paintings from the Cave. With unsettling truthfulness has Gary Paulsen captured herein the stifling panic of being trapped in a disgusting word of filth and violence with no visible means of escape, yet he has also imbued the novellas with an unmistakable sense of hope that causes the narratives to float just when one would have thought they could do nothing but sink.
The three stories in Paintings from the Cave are all separate from each other, linked only by the theme of an abusive or neglectful childhood having been endured by the main characters, so I will talk about each story individually. I hardly would have expected Gary Paulsen to be an author whom I would compare to Robert Cormier (except, perhaps, for his chilling narrative style in The Rifle), but the first story, Man of the Iron Heads, just may be as close as I've seen anyone come to Cormier since the master, himself. There's no silver lining to all of the clouds in this story, that's for sure. Jake (or just "J") lives with a friend named Layla in a derelict apartment building in an unnamed city, rife with violence and drug dealing and all manner of illegal activity. Though J is only twelve and Layla fifteen, he has been cast as a sort of guard for his older friend, who can't get around the way she used to since she's been impregnated. There isn't really enough food for both of them and J knows that their lives are at risk every day from the gang leader called The Blade who hangs around with his guys in the building, but there's not much J can do to improve the situation.
That is, there's not much he can do until a serendipitous coincidence gives him a window into a vastly different life no more than ten feet outside his own infested apartment building, in the prosperous structure set up across the alley. With only a thin strip of asphalt and a fence separating them, these two different apartment facilities could hardly be less alike, the difference between life and death, peace and terror, relative affluence and screaming poverty. As J looks out the window at this place across the way, he sees a young person living on his own in one of the apartments, moving around heads made out of metal in his kitchen. When he notices J watching him, J is instantly on the alert for some kind of trap, knowing all about the gruesome tricks that the ruthless thugs in his world would pull to put him at their mercy. J isn't used to anyone offering to do anything for him unless there's some big payment to be made on the back end of the deal, some crucial tipping point that makes the offer completely unacceptable if he wants to keep his life intact. But this guy who lives across the alley is something different for J; there's no scheme to snatch J into the apartment where he'll never be seen again, no negotiations to sell his body for some small but necessary commodity. There is, however, a doorway to a life as different from the one Jake is living as the ritzy apartment complex on the other side of the fence is from the dangerous tenement that he calls home, a better life in which the creation of art—sculptures of heads, which is what the artist was moving around in his apartment when J saw him—can be a satisfying expression of one's innermost thoughts and desires. No violence, no shystering, nothing but the clay between one's fingers to help in the recreation of the meaningful images that are already in one's mind. After initially offering to help the artist across the street only as a way to make some quick cash for no risk, J is drawn into the artistic expression of sculpture, his long-suppressed creativity rising to life under the tutelage of a kind instructor who knows what he's doing. It's amazing to think of two so vastly different worlds located practically side by side to each other, the imperfect sphere of urban bachelorism shining like pure gold beside the raging putridity of the lawless ghetto, both shockingly unaware of what really happens on the other side just a few feet away. It's ten feet to home free, or to a hellish breakdown of all order, depending on the side of the fence on which one starts, but J and his artist friend have clasped hands figuratively above the fence, forgoing their dissimilarities to focus on the artistic bonds that draw them together. Redemption is just a stone's throw away for J.
Release from captivity just couldn't come that easily for J, though. As the doors of his imagination open to a fascinating world that could actually hold some promise for a penniless kid without parents, the far-reaching influence of The Blade's gang zeroes in on J, and worse, on Layla, who is still pregnant with the child that keeps her from fleeing as quickly as J. In a night of devastating and irrevocable actions, the crude disregard for the beauty of life by those on one side of the fence, contrasted with the artistic vision that has been awakening from its dormancy inside of J, clash in a thunderous cacophony that will jar anyone down to their marrow. Sometimes things don't turn out the way they should. Sometimes lives are winked out in an instant and can't be revived, death comes creeping so silently that one never even feels its presence until it has pounced, and a lifetime of dreams are snuffed out like the flame of a single candle in a dark night, extinguished into the nothingness of absolute darkness. In chillingly Cormier-like fashion, Gary Paulsen brings the story to a close that will resound in the hearts of readers for a very long time, unforgettable and deeply sobering for the reality that it so uncompromisingly presents.
In Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl, the middle of the three novellas, we're introduced to Jo, who left her biological family a long time ago. There was too much drinking and abuse for her to survive at home much longer, but she wasn't fated to permanently be without a family. Over time, she adopts stray dogs to keep as her companions, and they are better to her by far than her family ever would have been. To Jo, dogs are infinitely better than people; they don't try to hurt her, they don't ask questions about the life she has chosen and try to get her back living with people, and they never attempt to conceal anything they're feeling from her. Dogs are the ideal companion for Jo, the only friends she ever wanted, until the day that brings a girl named Rose across their path as they're out walking. Rose isn't like the other kids that Jo has observed at school; she's quiet, honest and doesn't ask too many personal questions. Jo has never seen the need to add any humans to her canine circle of friends, but the dogs like Rose, and for reasons that she can't yet fully explain, Jo likes her, too. Though the dogs may still be the ideal companions for Jo after the abuse she endured at the hands of her parents, the only humans with whom she had ever lived, perhaps there's still a little bit of elasticity left in her willingness to give a human a chance to befriend her.
But even as Rose becomes a part of the group, and Jo sees that not all people are dumb, mean and unable to really listen, there's an inherent expiration date on the new friendship that neither Jo nor Rose can do anything to prevent. Sometimes when a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, a piece that you didn't even recognize was missing from the larger picture until you had it in your hand and were able to get a feel for it, that piece is suddenly confiscated in a way that couldn't have been foreseen. But how can one then go back to the picture as it was before, when the need for that missing piece wasn't even on one's radar, and think as before that the puzzle is complete and doesn't need anything extra? The path of the future is always a crooked one, winding and cutting and making shear drop-offs without warning so that there's no way of looking ahead and seeing where it might take you, but a severe jolt up ahead, even if one sees it coming and dreads the impact, doesn't have to lessen what one has right now and can still enjoy before the moment that will change it all. For Jo, her dogs know all about this, knew the uncertainty of the future with Rose before its reality ever dawned on Jo, and it's the dogs who can help them draw together and figure out what happens next. As has been the case for most of her life, the dogs will always be there for Jo. As she, herself, says: "They never hurt anyone and they know everything there is about love and all they want is to help us not be alone and scared. They never give up."
In the third novella, Erik's Rules, we're introduced to a couple of brothers who, like Jo in her story, have run away from abusive parents. Jamie and his older brother, Erik, have had to stay one step ahead of the law ever since they ditched their parents. It's a lot safer living on the streets than it would be trying to continue on at home, but now life is an endless stream of hard work for Erik, who at age seventeen is responsible for all of his little brother's needs and can't afford to take even one day off a week from his three daily jobs. It takes smarts to live as Erik and Jamie do, Jamie still going to school but always having to be on the alert that someone might be on to his home situation. Though he wants to make it so that they don't have to steal or cheat to survive, Erik has had to manipulate a number of official information sources to protect their tenuous arrangement, including buying a fake driver's license so that the whole deal doesn't collapse if he's ever pulled over by the police. Their car is technically stolen, too, swiped from their mother's boyfriend, but he's not likely to raise the alarm on a hunk of junk that was illegally owned, so they're probably fairly safe on that end.
Drawing has always been the way that Jamie releases the raw emotions that build up inside of him, spilling out in black and white so that they don't come out in less appropriate ways. Drawing, and watching the dogs being walked at the dog park, which one day leads him to meet a man named Greg with a fistful of dogs on leashes who seems very interested in Jamie's artwork. Erik has warned Jamie countless times about staying away from troublesome individuals who could do him more harm than even their parents, but Greg seems trustworthy. Seeing the quality of Jamie's drawings, particularly the sharp imagery of his renderings of the dogs, Greg offers him a job sketching the canine residents at the shelter where he works, which he hopes will be much better in representing the personalities of the dogs than the lackluster photographs that he's been using. Jamie knows that the extra money would be a huge help to him and his brother, but what he doesn't know is that when Greg figures out the truth about how the brothers are living, there may be something even more significant that he can do to be of aid to them. Homeless life, bouncing from one temporary shelter to another all the time with little respite, could be over for Jamie and Erik if all goes well. And there's one more thing that Greg can contribute to their arrangement, if they're willing to take a chance on someone very important.
While some of Erik's Rules, sprinkled throughout the text of the story, appear limited chiefly to life on the run, all of them have at least some application to regular life, able to teach us something valuable that we may have known but not quite fully understood. Still, it's not one of Erik's rules, but an observation made by Jamie about homeless life, that sticks out most in my mind: "Quick fixes are the only thing I've got these days." I've never been homeless, but I sure know what it's like to feel like the solutions I think up to my problems are nothing but an unending series of quick fixes, stopgap measures that do nothing to permanently address the issues even as they keep it together for one more day. I guess that's how life tends to go, the possibility for perfection in anything becoming just a distant memory as one settles more and more for the imperfection of band-aid solutions. It's not ideal, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and at the end of the day sometimes that's all that matters.
To me, the story that really seems to stand out as different from the other two is the first one, Man of the Iron Heads. Its intensity has a completely different feel; while I would never think to compare the other two novellas to the work of Robert Cormier, the elements of the first story that brought that comparison to mind for me were impossible to miss. Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl and Erik's Rules have a more hopeful spirit about them than Man of the Iron Heads, but there's little doubt in my mind that the first novella is the best of the bunch, and its effect on me will last much longer than that of the other two. While sometimes brutal and often disturbing, the stories in this collection are remarkably realistic, never sacrificing the grittiness of authentic narrative for a feel-good ending if it doesn't fit. I'm always amazed by how good Gary Paulsen's writing consistently tends to be despite the fact that he has written hundreds of books, somehow not sacrificing quality of ideas for quantity of material, and Paintings from the Cave is another fine work that deserves mention on the same level as some of his classics. I would give it three and a half stars.
—Paintings from the Cave, P. 32
Gary Paulsen starts right off in this book by dealing with some heavy issues in the opening "Note from the Author". He mentions the dark nature of his own youth, and admits that when he was a kid it was only literature and dogs that allowed him to see the light of hope in his life just enough to give him reason to keep moving forward toward that day when he would be free of his parents and could begin building his own version of a life. More than just acknowledging the deprivations of his own childhood, though, Gary Paulsen talks about the times when kids who have come to listen to him speak at author events ask him hard questions about what one is supposed to do when home life gets so bad that there isn't any visible light at the other end of the tunnel, no reason to think that there's anything waiting up ahead but more shame and misery. As in the three short stories that make up Paintings from the Cave, Gary Paulsen doesn't try to answer these questions with glib sentiments of hopefulness that any kid out on the streets will see through in a New York minute. He recognizes that in many cases, when their lives are really, really bad, it's not enough to tell them that it's just a matter of marking time, waiting out the years to age eighteen so that they can finally embark on a journey to find their own destiny. When things are too bad to see even the next day, or the next week, years of suffering is too much to handle. No matter how earnestly one tells an abused and afflicted child to wait out the storm because there will be a better tomorrow arriving eventually, it doesn't fix the right now, this very moment when they need release from the horrors of their life more than they can even imagine needing anything else. Sometimes tomorrow is too long to wait for relief from the pain, whatever its cause, and this concept of emotional vulcanism is the driving force behind the three stories in Paintings from the Cave. With unsettling truthfulness has Gary Paulsen captured herein the stifling panic of being trapped in a disgusting word of filth and violence with no visible means of escape, yet he has also imbued the novellas with an unmistakable sense of hope that causes the narratives to float just when one would have thought they could do nothing but sink.
The three stories in Paintings from the Cave are all separate from each other, linked only by the theme of an abusive or neglectful childhood having been endured by the main characters, so I will talk about each story individually. I hardly would have expected Gary Paulsen to be an author whom I would compare to Robert Cormier (except, perhaps, for his chilling narrative style in The Rifle), but the first story, Man of the Iron Heads, just may be as close as I've seen anyone come to Cormier since the master, himself. There's no silver lining to all of the clouds in this story, that's for sure. Jake (or just "J") lives with a friend named Layla in a derelict apartment building in an unnamed city, rife with violence and drug dealing and all manner of illegal activity. Though J is only twelve and Layla fifteen, he has been cast as a sort of guard for his older friend, who can't get around the way she used to since she's been impregnated. There isn't really enough food for both of them and J knows that their lives are at risk every day from the gang leader called The Blade who hangs around with his guys in the building, but there's not much J can do to improve the situation.
That is, there's not much he can do until a serendipitous coincidence gives him a window into a vastly different life no more than ten feet outside his own infested apartment building, in the prosperous structure set up across the alley. With only a thin strip of asphalt and a fence separating them, these two different apartment facilities could hardly be less alike, the difference between life and death, peace and terror, relative affluence and screaming poverty. As J looks out the window at this place across the way, he sees a young person living on his own in one of the apartments, moving around heads made out of metal in his kitchen. When he notices J watching him, J is instantly on the alert for some kind of trap, knowing all about the gruesome tricks that the ruthless thugs in his world would pull to put him at their mercy. J isn't used to anyone offering to do anything for him unless there's some big payment to be made on the back end of the deal, some crucial tipping point that makes the offer completely unacceptable if he wants to keep his life intact. But this guy who lives across the alley is something different for J; there's no scheme to snatch J into the apartment where he'll never be seen again, no negotiations to sell his body for some small but necessary commodity. There is, however, a doorway to a life as different from the one Jake is living as the ritzy apartment complex on the other side of the fence is from the dangerous tenement that he calls home, a better life in which the creation of art—sculptures of heads, which is what the artist was moving around in his apartment when J saw him—can be a satisfying expression of one's innermost thoughts and desires. No violence, no shystering, nothing but the clay between one's fingers to help in the recreation of the meaningful images that are already in one's mind. After initially offering to help the artist across the street only as a way to make some quick cash for no risk, J is drawn into the artistic expression of sculpture, his long-suppressed creativity rising to life under the tutelage of a kind instructor who knows what he's doing. It's amazing to think of two so vastly different worlds located practically side by side to each other, the imperfect sphere of urban bachelorism shining like pure gold beside the raging putridity of the lawless ghetto, both shockingly unaware of what really happens on the other side just a few feet away. It's ten feet to home free, or to a hellish breakdown of all order, depending on the side of the fence on which one starts, but J and his artist friend have clasped hands figuratively above the fence, forgoing their dissimilarities to focus on the artistic bonds that draw them together. Redemption is just a stone's throw away for J.
Release from captivity just couldn't come that easily for J, though. As the doors of his imagination open to a fascinating world that could actually hold some promise for a penniless kid without parents, the far-reaching influence of The Blade's gang zeroes in on J, and worse, on Layla, who is still pregnant with the child that keeps her from fleeing as quickly as J. In a night of devastating and irrevocable actions, the crude disregard for the beauty of life by those on one side of the fence, contrasted with the artistic vision that has been awakening from its dormancy inside of J, clash in a thunderous cacophony that will jar anyone down to their marrow. Sometimes things don't turn out the way they should. Sometimes lives are winked out in an instant and can't be revived, death comes creeping so silently that one never even feels its presence until it has pounced, and a lifetime of dreams are snuffed out like the flame of a single candle in a dark night, extinguished into the nothingness of absolute darkness. In chillingly Cormier-like fashion, Gary Paulsen brings the story to a close that will resound in the hearts of readers for a very long time, unforgettable and deeply sobering for the reality that it so uncompromisingly presents.
In Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl, the middle of the three novellas, we're introduced to Jo, who left her biological family a long time ago. There was too much drinking and abuse for her to survive at home much longer, but she wasn't fated to permanently be without a family. Over time, she adopts stray dogs to keep as her companions, and they are better to her by far than her family ever would have been. To Jo, dogs are infinitely better than people; they don't try to hurt her, they don't ask questions about the life she has chosen and try to get her back living with people, and they never attempt to conceal anything they're feeling from her. Dogs are the ideal companion for Jo, the only friends she ever wanted, until the day that brings a girl named Rose across their path as they're out walking. Rose isn't like the other kids that Jo has observed at school; she's quiet, honest and doesn't ask too many personal questions. Jo has never seen the need to add any humans to her canine circle of friends, but the dogs like Rose, and for reasons that she can't yet fully explain, Jo likes her, too. Though the dogs may still be the ideal companions for Jo after the abuse she endured at the hands of her parents, the only humans with whom she had ever lived, perhaps there's still a little bit of elasticity left in her willingness to give a human a chance to befriend her.
But even as Rose becomes a part of the group, and Jo sees that not all people are dumb, mean and unable to really listen, there's an inherent expiration date on the new friendship that neither Jo nor Rose can do anything to prevent. Sometimes when a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, a piece that you didn't even recognize was missing from the larger picture until you had it in your hand and were able to get a feel for it, that piece is suddenly confiscated in a way that couldn't have been foreseen. But how can one then go back to the picture as it was before, when the need for that missing piece wasn't even on one's radar, and think as before that the puzzle is complete and doesn't need anything extra? The path of the future is always a crooked one, winding and cutting and making shear drop-offs without warning so that there's no way of looking ahead and seeing where it might take you, but a severe jolt up ahead, even if one sees it coming and dreads the impact, doesn't have to lessen what one has right now and can still enjoy before the moment that will change it all. For Jo, her dogs know all about this, knew the uncertainty of the future with Rose before its reality ever dawned on Jo, and it's the dogs who can help them draw together and figure out what happens next. As has been the case for most of her life, the dogs will always be there for Jo. As she, herself, says: "They never hurt anyone and they know everything there is about love and all they want is to help us not be alone and scared. They never give up."
In the third novella, Erik's Rules, we're introduced to a couple of brothers who, like Jo in her story, have run away from abusive parents. Jamie and his older brother, Erik, have had to stay one step ahead of the law ever since they ditched their parents. It's a lot safer living on the streets than it would be trying to continue on at home, but now life is an endless stream of hard work for Erik, who at age seventeen is responsible for all of his little brother's needs and can't afford to take even one day off a week from his three daily jobs. It takes smarts to live as Erik and Jamie do, Jamie still going to school but always having to be on the alert that someone might be on to his home situation. Though he wants to make it so that they don't have to steal or cheat to survive, Erik has had to manipulate a number of official information sources to protect their tenuous arrangement, including buying a fake driver's license so that the whole deal doesn't collapse if he's ever pulled over by the police. Their car is technically stolen, too, swiped from their mother's boyfriend, but he's not likely to raise the alarm on a hunk of junk that was illegally owned, so they're probably fairly safe on that end.
Drawing has always been the way that Jamie releases the raw emotions that build up inside of him, spilling out in black and white so that they don't come out in less appropriate ways. Drawing, and watching the dogs being walked at the dog park, which one day leads him to meet a man named Greg with a fistful of dogs on leashes who seems very interested in Jamie's artwork. Erik has warned Jamie countless times about staying away from troublesome individuals who could do him more harm than even their parents, but Greg seems trustworthy. Seeing the quality of Jamie's drawings, particularly the sharp imagery of his renderings of the dogs, Greg offers him a job sketching the canine residents at the shelter where he works, which he hopes will be much better in representing the personalities of the dogs than the lackluster photographs that he's been using. Jamie knows that the extra money would be a huge help to him and his brother, but what he doesn't know is that when Greg figures out the truth about how the brothers are living, there may be something even more significant that he can do to be of aid to them. Homeless life, bouncing from one temporary shelter to another all the time with little respite, could be over for Jamie and Erik if all goes well. And there's one more thing that Greg can contribute to their arrangement, if they're willing to take a chance on someone very important.
While some of Erik's Rules, sprinkled throughout the text of the story, appear limited chiefly to life on the run, all of them have at least some application to regular life, able to teach us something valuable that we may have known but not quite fully understood. Still, it's not one of Erik's rules, but an observation made by Jamie about homeless life, that sticks out most in my mind: "Quick fixes are the only thing I've got these days." I've never been homeless, but I sure know what it's like to feel like the solutions I think up to my problems are nothing but an unending series of quick fixes, stopgap measures that do nothing to permanently address the issues even as they keep it together for one more day. I guess that's how life tends to go, the possibility for perfection in anything becoming just a distant memory as one settles more and more for the imperfection of band-aid solutions. It's not ideal, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and at the end of the day sometimes that's all that matters.
To me, the story that really seems to stand out as different from the other two is the first one, Man of the Iron Heads. Its intensity has a completely different feel; while I would never think to compare the other two novellas to the work of Robert Cormier, the elements of the first story that brought that comparison to mind for me were impossible to miss. Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl and Erik's Rules have a more hopeful spirit about them than Man of the Iron Heads, but there's little doubt in my mind that the first novella is the best of the bunch, and its effect on me will last much longer than that of the other two. While sometimes brutal and often disturbing, the stories in this collection are remarkably realistic, never sacrificing the grittiness of authentic narrative for a feel-good ending if it doesn't fit. I'm always amazed by how good Gary Paulsen's writing consistently tends to be despite the fact that he has written hundreds of books, somehow not sacrificing quality of ideas for quantity of material, and Paintings from the Cave is another fine work that deserves mention on the same level as some of his classics. I would give it three and a half stars.
December 9, 2011
I started this book thinking that the three novellas it contained would end up being so short that I wouldn't be able to get much out of them. Never having read anything by this author before, I definitely underestimated him. Gary Paulsen carefully crafts three different worlds, all the realities of three children. These kids have known more hurt and heartache than most people have in a lifetime and shouldn't have had to go through. But Paulsen doesn't present them in a way that calls for immediate answers and absolute solutions, instead choosing to point out how little outsiders can understand what these people are going through. And unless we take the time to understand people who might not have all of the advantages we do, there's no possible way for us to help them.
I was quickly immersed in all three stories, as Jake, Jojo, and Jamie all find different, unique ways of escape. It's this little ray of hope in their lives, contrasted with the darkness that threatens to overshadow everything, that really drives the overall message home.
I hope that more people give this book a chance. It's a very quick read, interesting and beautiful, that deserves to be at least considered by everyone. I say give it a chance, because you might be surprised (and enjoy) what you will find.
CAPTIVATING. 4/5 stars
I was quickly immersed in all three stories, as Jake, Jojo, and Jamie all find different, unique ways of escape. It's this little ray of hope in their lives, contrasted with the darkness that threatens to overshadow everything, that really drives the overall message home.
I hope that more people give this book a chance. It's a very quick read, interesting and beautiful, that deserves to be at least considered by everyone. I say give it a chance, because you might be surprised (and enjoy) what you will find.
CAPTIVATING. 4/5 stars
November 2, 2018
Aspirational, to sculpt lives that I doubt he could have known. Certainly memorable, and tragic and scary. More foreign than anything I’ve ever seen.
Author hopes it could help kids like these, and maybe it can. I can’t judge, or even empathize through the huge gulf of distance.
As much as I love dogs...
I wish it could help... anyone.
It did help me understand, a bit, and the third story especially pulled at my heart. 4 stars for overly formulaic, but Erik’s Rukes (the 3rd story) would be a 5 star gem standing alone.
Author hopes it could help kids like these, and maybe it can. I can’t judge, or even empathize through the huge gulf of distance.
As much as I love dogs...
I wish it could help... anyone.
It did help me understand, a bit, and the third story especially pulled at my heart. 4 stars for overly formulaic, but Erik’s Rukes (the 3rd story) would be a 5 star gem standing alone.
May 28, 2021
I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed these short stories and look forward to possibly teaching one or more.
March 13, 2012
Let me begin by saying that I read this book in one day, a windy day with my dogs curled beside me. How could I not love this book?
The first story "Man of the Iron Heads" was really sad yet so true. I am reminded of a student who walked by my house every day. One day he got in trouble in class and had to miss lunch. He was sobbing because he was missing lunch. Upon discussion about the fight in class and his reaction to missing lunch it turned out that he was locked out of the house all day AND locked out the refridgerator when he was home. My heart broke. Of course child protective services got involved and all was ugly though he remained the same sweet boy. I wonder if he still is. As someone looking out the window it's hard to recognize all the ill-will and suffering in life. Our kids are extremely strong to overcome all that they must.
The next two stories were both included dogs. Although the dog doesn't show up until later in "Eric's Rules" as readers we know it will have a satisfying ending--especially when reading it with your dogs.
The first story "Man of the Iron Heads" was really sad yet so true. I am reminded of a student who walked by my house every day. One day he got in trouble in class and had to miss lunch. He was sobbing because he was missing lunch. Upon discussion about the fight in class and his reaction to missing lunch it turned out that he was locked out of the house all day AND locked out the refridgerator when he was home. My heart broke. Of course child protective services got involved and all was ugly though he remained the same sweet boy. I wonder if he still is. As someone looking out the window it's hard to recognize all the ill-will and suffering in life. Our kids are extremely strong to overcome all that they must.
The next two stories were both included dogs. Although the dog doesn't show up until later in "Eric's Rules" as readers we know it will have a satisfying ending--especially when reading it with your dogs.
September 17, 2012
It's almost impossible to go wrong with any book written by Gary Paulsen, and this one is no exception. The three separate stories all deal with similar themes of very difficult childhood experiences in which dogs and/or art play a major healing role. Of course, these stories mirror Gary Paulsen's own childhood, about which he has written extensively. As a dog lover, I relate especially well to the important therapeutic role that dogs play in Gary Paulsen's books, both fiction and nonfiction (e.g., My Life in Dog Years). In this new book, he also introduces the powerful effect that art can have on struggling young adults.
The stories in this book are definitely not the sort where everyone lives happily ever after; the pain and suffering the young characters experience is sometimes quite difficult to read about. Ultimately though, the reader is left feeling more hopeful than not. Because of the content, I'd recommend this for 7th grade and up.
The stories in this book are definitely not the sort where everyone lives happily ever after; the pain and suffering the young characters experience is sometimes quite difficult to read about. Ultimately though, the reader is left feeling more hopeful than not. Because of the content, I'd recommend this for 7th grade and up.
June 18, 2012
Three separate stories about three different teenagers going through three totally different and yet similarly painful existences. All three give you such a clear picture of what their daily life is like and how it is so different than mine. It's a book for all of humanity to read. I've heard Gary Paulsen speak of his hard childhood and give great kudos to a man that can relate to readers on paper.
I picked this books up because it made the Lonestar reading list. But was encouraged to read it when I saw who had written it. I finished it in a day because I just couldn't put it down. I was compelled to learn more of each character introduced.
I would recommend this to any of my students that are fed up with books that have a happy ending. I would give this to any reader that doesn't relate to the happy characters and happy settings and worse of all happy endings. Sometimes readers don't want to escape, sometimes they need to know they are not alone.
I picked this books up because it made the Lonestar reading list. But was encouraged to read it when I saw who had written it. I finished it in a day because I just couldn't put it down. I was compelled to learn more of each character introduced.
I would recommend this to any of my students that are fed up with books that have a happy ending. I would give this to any reader that doesn't relate to the happy characters and happy settings and worse of all happy endings. Sometimes readers don't want to escape, sometimes they need to know they are not alone.
July 22, 2014
This was somewhat of a surprise book to read. While the book description gave some idea about the book contents, actually reading the book was another adventure. This was a well written book about the not-so-happy-times of life, the road of hard knocks, and life that we want to ignore or forget. Not everyone has a life that is described on the pages, yet there is always a story to tell. A good read and a recommendation for anyone who needs a good wake up call. The happy note of the book is that each story gets closer to a happy ending and the final story does leave a happy thought. As always, Gary Paulsen has written as beautiful as ever.
July 22, 2012
Three short novellas that will fill your heart to overflowing...stories of young people facing daily life under the scathing brutality of drugs, gangs, foster care abuse and homelessness. From art, friends, even the wet noses of a loyal pet-- these kids manage to carve out a place to belong and find beauty and comfort in having "just enough"...a beautiful rendering that will leave the reader with a lingering sense of sadness as well as tearful joy in the resiliency of the human spirit.
July 30, 2012
Grim, moving stories about young people in desperate circumstances finding ways to survive their lots in life. Real, vivid and raw.
November 10, 2012
Copied from "Josiah":
""You can't learn anything talking 'cause you're just saying stuff you already know. You've got to be quiet to learn."
—Paintings from the Cave, P. 32
Gary Paulsen starts right off in this book by dealing with some heavy issues in the opening "Note from the Author". He mentions the dark nature of his own youth, and admits that when he was a kid it was only literature and dogs that allowed him to see the light of hope in his life just enough to give him reason to keep moving forward toward that day when he would be free of his parents and could begin building his own version of a life. More than just acknowledging the deprivations of his own childhood, though, Gary Paulsen talks about the times when kids who have come to listen to him speak at author events ask him hard questions about what one is supposed to do when home life gets so bad that there isn't any visible light at the other end of the tunnel, no reason to think that there's anything waiting up ahead but more shame and misery. As in the three short stories that make up Paintings from the Cave, Gary Paulsen doesn't try to answer these questions with glib sentiments of hopefulness that any kid out on the streets will see through in a New York minute. He recognizes that in many cases, when their lives are really, really bad, it's not enough to tell them that it's just a matter of marking time, waiting out the years to age eighteen so that they can finally embark on a journey to find their own destiny. When things are too bad to see even the next day, or the next week, years of suffering is too much to handle. No matter how earnestly one tells an abused and afflicted child to wait out the storm because there will be a better tomorrow arriving eventually, it doesn't fix the right now, this very moment when they need release from the horrors of their life more than they can even imagine needing anything else. Sometimes tomorrow is too long to wait for relief from the pain, whatever its cause, and this concept of emotional vulcanism is the driving force behind the three stories in Paintings from the Cave. With unsettling truthfulness has Gary Paulsen captured herein the stifling panic of being trapped in a disgusting word of filth and violence with no visible means of escape, yet he has also imbued the novellas with an unmistakable sense of hope that causes the narratives to float just when one would have thought they could do nothing but sink.
The three stories in Paintings from the Cave are all separate from each other, linked only by the theme of an abusive or neglectful childhood having been endured by the main characters, so I will talk about each story individually. I hardly would have expected Gary Paulsen to be an author whom I would compare to Robert Cormier (except, perhaps, for his chilling narrative style in The Rifle), but the first story, Man of the Iron Heads, just may be as close as I've seen anyone come to Cormier since the master, himself. There's no silver lining to all of the clouds in this story, that's for sure. Jake (or just "J") lives with a friend named Layla in a derelict apartment building in an unnamed city, rife with violence and drug dealing and all manner of illegal activity. Though J is only twelve and Layla fifteen, he has been cast as a sort of guard for his older friend, who can't get around the way she used to since she's been impregnated. There isn't really enough food for both of them and J knows that their lives are at risk every day from the gang leader called The Blade who hangs around with his guys in the building, but there's not much J can do to improve the situation.
That is, there's not much he can do until a serendipitous coincidence gives him a window into a vastly different life no more than ten feet outside his own infested apartment building, in the prosperous structure set up across the alley. With only a thin strip of asphalt and a fence separating them, these two different apartment facilities could hardly be less alike, the difference between life and death, peace and terror, relative affluence and screaming poverty. As J looks out the window at this place across the way, he sees a young person living on his own in one of the apartments, moving around heads made out of metal in his kitchen. When he notices J watching him, J is instantly on the alert for some kind of trap, knowing all about the gruesome tricks that the ruthless thugs in his world would pull to put him at their mercy. J isn't used to anyone offering to do anything for him unless there's some big payment to be made on the back end of the deal, some crucial tipping point that makes the offer completely unacceptable if he wants to keep his life intact. But this guy who lives across the alley is something different for J; there's no scheme to snatch J into the apartment where he'll never be seen again, no negotiations to sell his body for some small but necessary commodity. There is, however, a doorway to a life as different from the one Jake is living as the ritzy apartment complex on the other side of the fence is from the dangerous tenement that he calls home, a better life in which the creation of art—sculptures of heads, which is what the artist was moving around in his apartment when J saw him—can be a satisfying expression of one's innermost thoughts and desires. No violence, no shystering, nothing but the clay between one's fingers to help in the recreation of the meaningful images that are already in one's mind. After initially offering to help the artist across the street only as a way to make some quick cash for no risk, J is drawn into the artistic expression of sculpture, his long-suppressed creativity rising to life under the tutelage of a kind instructor who knows what he's doing. It's amazing to think of two so vastly different worlds located practically side by side to each other, the imperfect sphere of urban bachelorism shining like pure gold beside the raging putridity of the lawless ghetto, both shockingly unaware of what really happens on the other side just a few feet away. It's ten feet to home free, or to a hellish breakdown of all order, depending on the side of the fence on which one starts, but J and his artist friend have clasped hands figuratively above the fence, forgoing their dissimilarities to focus on the artistic bonds that draw them together. Redemption is just a stone's throw away for J.
Release from captivity just couldn't come that easily for J, though. As the doors of his imagination open to a fascinating world that could actually hold some promise for a penniless kid without parents, the far-reaching influence of The Blade's gang zeroes in on J, and worse, on Layla, who is still pregnant with the child that keeps her from fleeing as quickly as J. In a night of devastating and irrevocable actions, the crude disregard for the beauty of life by those on one side of the fence, contrasted with the artistic vision that has been awakening from its dormancy inside of J, clash in a thunderous cacophony that will jar anyone down to their marrow. Sometimes things don't turn out the way they should. Sometimes lives are winked out in an instant and can't be revived, death comes creeping so silently that one never even feels its presence until it has pounced, and a lifetime of dreams are snuffed out like the flame of a single candle in a dark night, extinguished into the nothingness of absolute darkness. In chillingly Cormier-like fashion, Gary Paulsen brings the story to a close that will resound in the hearts of readers for a very long time, unforgettable and deeply sobering for the reality that it so uncompromisingly presents.
In Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl, the middle of the three novellas, we're introduced to Jo, who left her biological family a long time ago. There was too much drinking and abuse for her to survive at home much longer, but she wasn't fated to permanently be without a family. Over time, she adopts stray dogs to keep as her companions, and they are better to her by far than her family ever would have been. To Jo, dogs are infinitely better than people; they don't try to hurt her, they don't ask questions about the life she has chosen and try to get her back living with people, and they never attempt to conceal anything they're feeling from her. Dogs are the ideal companion for Jo, the only friends she ever wanted, until the day that brings a girl named Rose across their path as they're out walking. Rose isn't like the other kids that Jo has observed at school; she's quiet, honest and doesn't ask too many personal questions. Jo has never seen the need to add any humans to her canine circle of friends, but the dogs like Rose, and for reasons that she can't yet fully explain, Jo likes her, too. Though the dogs may still be the ideal companions for Jo after the abuse she endured at the hands of her parents, the only humans with whom she had ever lived, perhaps there's still a little bit of elasticity left in her willingness to give a human a chance to befriend her.
But even as Rose becomes a part of the group, and Jo sees that not all people are dumb, mean and unable to really listen, there's an inherent expiration date on the new friendship that neither Jo nor Rose can do anything to prevent. Sometimes when a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, a piece that you didn't even recognize was missing from the larger picture until you had it in your hand and were able to get a feel for it, that piece is suddenly confiscated in a way that couldn't have been foreseen. But how can one then go back to the picture as it was before, when the need for that missing piece wasn't even on one's radar, and think as before that the puzzle is complete and doesn't need anything extra? The path of the future is always a crooked one, winding and cutting and making shear drop-offs without warning so that there's no way of looking ahead and seeing where it might take you, but a severe jolt up ahead, even if one sees it coming and dreads the impact, doesn't have to lessen what one has right now and can still enjoy before the moment that will change it all. For Jo, her dogs know all about this, knew the uncertainty of the future with Rose before its reality ever dawned on Jo, and it's the dogs who can help them draw together and figure out what happens next. As has been the case for most of her life, the dogs will always be there for Jo. As she, herself, says: "They never hurt anyone and they know everything there is about love and all they want is to help us not be alone and scared. They never give up."
In the third novella, Erik's Rules, we're introduced to a couple of brothers who, like Jo in her story, have run away from abusive parents. Jamie and his older brother, Erik, have had to stay one step ahead of the law ever since they ditched their parents. It's a lot safer living on the streets than it would be trying to continue on at home, but now life is an endless stream of hard work for Erik, who at age seventeen is responsible for all of his little brother's needs and can't afford to take even one day off a week from his three daily jobs. It takes smarts to live as Erik and Jamie do, Jamie still going to school but always having to be on the alert that someone might be on to his home situation. Though he wants to make it so that they don't have to steal or cheat to survive, Erik has had to manipulate a number of official information sources to protect their tenuous arrangement, including buying a fake driver's license so that the whole deal doesn't collapse if he's ever pulled over by the police. Their car is technically stolen, too, swiped from their mother's boyfriend, but he's not likely to raise the alarm on a hunk of junk that was illegally owned, so they're probably fairly safe on that end.
Drawing has always been the way that Jamie releases the raw emotions that build up inside of him, spilling out in black and white so that they don't come out in less appropriate ways. Drawing, and watching the dogs being walked at the dog park, which one day leads him to meet a man named Greg with a fistful of dogs on leashes who seems very interested in Jamie's artwork. Erik has warned Jamie countless times about staying away from troublesome individuals who could do him more harm than even their parents, but Greg seems trustworthy. Seeing the quality of Jamie's drawings, particularly the sharp imagery of his renderings of the dogs, Greg offers him a job sketching the canine residents at the shelter where he works, which he hopes will be much better in representing the personalities of the dogs than the lackluster photographs that he's been using. Jamie knows that the extra money would be a huge help to him and his brother, but what he doesn't know is that when Greg figures out the truth about how the brothers are living, there may be something even more significant that he can do to be of aid to them. Homeless life, bouncing from one temporary shelter to another all the time with little respite, could be over for Jamie and Erik if all goes well. And there's one more thing that Greg can contribute to their arrangement, if they're willing to take a chance on someone very important.
While some of Erik's Rules, sprinkled throughout the text of the story, appear limited chiefly to life on the run, all of them have at least some application to regular life, able to teach us something valuable that we may have known but not quite fully understood. Still, it's not one of Erik's rules, but an observation made by Jamie about homeless life, that sticks out most in my mind: "Quick fixes are the only thing I've got these days." I've never been homeless, but I sure know what it's like to feel like the solutions I think up to my problems are nothing but an unending series of quick fixes, stopgap measures that do nothing to permanently address the issues even as they keep it together for one more day. I guess that's how life tends to go, the possibility for perfection in anything becoming just a distant memory as one settles more and more for the imperfection of band-aid solutions. It's not ideal, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and at the end of the day sometimes that's all that matters.
To me, the story that really seems to stand out as different from the other two is the first one, Man of the Iron Heads. Its intensity has a completely different feel; while I would never think to compare the other two novellas to the work of Robert Cormier, the elements of the first story that brought that comparison to mind for me were impossible to miss. Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl and Erik's Rules have a more hopeful spirit about them than Man of the Iron Heads, but there's little doubt in my mind that the first novella is the best of the bunch, and its effect on me will last much longer than that of the other two. While sometimes brutal and often disturbing, the stories in this collection are remarkably realistic, never sacrificing the grittiness of authentic narrative for a feel-good ending if it doesn't fit. I'm always amazed by how good Gary Paulsen's writing consistently tends to be despite the fact that he has written hundreds of books, somehow not sacrificing quality of ideas for quantity of material, and Paintings from the Cave is another fine work that deserves mention on the same level as some of his classics. I would give it three and a half stars."
""You can't learn anything talking 'cause you're just saying stuff you already know. You've got to be quiet to learn."
—Paintings from the Cave, P. 32
Gary Paulsen starts right off in this book by dealing with some heavy issues in the opening "Note from the Author". He mentions the dark nature of his own youth, and admits that when he was a kid it was only literature and dogs that allowed him to see the light of hope in his life just enough to give him reason to keep moving forward toward that day when he would be free of his parents and could begin building his own version of a life. More than just acknowledging the deprivations of his own childhood, though, Gary Paulsen talks about the times when kids who have come to listen to him speak at author events ask him hard questions about what one is supposed to do when home life gets so bad that there isn't any visible light at the other end of the tunnel, no reason to think that there's anything waiting up ahead but more shame and misery. As in the three short stories that make up Paintings from the Cave, Gary Paulsen doesn't try to answer these questions with glib sentiments of hopefulness that any kid out on the streets will see through in a New York minute. He recognizes that in many cases, when their lives are really, really bad, it's not enough to tell them that it's just a matter of marking time, waiting out the years to age eighteen so that they can finally embark on a journey to find their own destiny. When things are too bad to see even the next day, or the next week, years of suffering is too much to handle. No matter how earnestly one tells an abused and afflicted child to wait out the storm because there will be a better tomorrow arriving eventually, it doesn't fix the right now, this very moment when they need release from the horrors of their life more than they can even imagine needing anything else. Sometimes tomorrow is too long to wait for relief from the pain, whatever its cause, and this concept of emotional vulcanism is the driving force behind the three stories in Paintings from the Cave. With unsettling truthfulness has Gary Paulsen captured herein the stifling panic of being trapped in a disgusting word of filth and violence with no visible means of escape, yet he has also imbued the novellas with an unmistakable sense of hope that causes the narratives to float just when one would have thought they could do nothing but sink.
The three stories in Paintings from the Cave are all separate from each other, linked only by the theme of an abusive or neglectful childhood having been endured by the main characters, so I will talk about each story individually. I hardly would have expected Gary Paulsen to be an author whom I would compare to Robert Cormier (except, perhaps, for his chilling narrative style in The Rifle), but the first story, Man of the Iron Heads, just may be as close as I've seen anyone come to Cormier since the master, himself. There's no silver lining to all of the clouds in this story, that's for sure. Jake (or just "J") lives with a friend named Layla in a derelict apartment building in an unnamed city, rife with violence and drug dealing and all manner of illegal activity. Though J is only twelve and Layla fifteen, he has been cast as a sort of guard for his older friend, who can't get around the way she used to since she's been impregnated. There isn't really enough food for both of them and J knows that their lives are at risk every day from the gang leader called The Blade who hangs around with his guys in the building, but there's not much J can do to improve the situation.
That is, there's not much he can do until a serendipitous coincidence gives him a window into a vastly different life no more than ten feet outside his own infested apartment building, in the prosperous structure set up across the alley. With only a thin strip of asphalt and a fence separating them, these two different apartment facilities could hardly be less alike, the difference between life and death, peace and terror, relative affluence and screaming poverty. As J looks out the window at this place across the way, he sees a young person living on his own in one of the apartments, moving around heads made out of metal in his kitchen. When he notices J watching him, J is instantly on the alert for some kind of trap, knowing all about the gruesome tricks that the ruthless thugs in his world would pull to put him at their mercy. J isn't used to anyone offering to do anything for him unless there's some big payment to be made on the back end of the deal, some crucial tipping point that makes the offer completely unacceptable if he wants to keep his life intact. But this guy who lives across the alley is something different for J; there's no scheme to snatch J into the apartment where he'll never be seen again, no negotiations to sell his body for some small but necessary commodity. There is, however, a doorway to a life as different from the one Jake is living as the ritzy apartment complex on the other side of the fence is from the dangerous tenement that he calls home, a better life in which the creation of art—sculptures of heads, which is what the artist was moving around in his apartment when J saw him—can be a satisfying expression of one's innermost thoughts and desires. No violence, no shystering, nothing but the clay between one's fingers to help in the recreation of the meaningful images that are already in one's mind. After initially offering to help the artist across the street only as a way to make some quick cash for no risk, J is drawn into the artistic expression of sculpture, his long-suppressed creativity rising to life under the tutelage of a kind instructor who knows what he's doing. It's amazing to think of two so vastly different worlds located practically side by side to each other, the imperfect sphere of urban bachelorism shining like pure gold beside the raging putridity of the lawless ghetto, both shockingly unaware of what really happens on the other side just a few feet away. It's ten feet to home free, or to a hellish breakdown of all order, depending on the side of the fence on which one starts, but J and his artist friend have clasped hands figuratively above the fence, forgoing their dissimilarities to focus on the artistic bonds that draw them together. Redemption is just a stone's throw away for J.
Release from captivity just couldn't come that easily for J, though. As the doors of his imagination open to a fascinating world that could actually hold some promise for a penniless kid without parents, the far-reaching influence of The Blade's gang zeroes in on J, and worse, on Layla, who is still pregnant with the child that keeps her from fleeing as quickly as J. In a night of devastating and irrevocable actions, the crude disregard for the beauty of life by those on one side of the fence, contrasted with the artistic vision that has been awakening from its dormancy inside of J, clash in a thunderous cacophony that will jar anyone down to their marrow. Sometimes things don't turn out the way they should. Sometimes lives are winked out in an instant and can't be revived, death comes creeping so silently that one never even feels its presence until it has pounced, and a lifetime of dreams are snuffed out like the flame of a single candle in a dark night, extinguished into the nothingness of absolute darkness. In chillingly Cormier-like fashion, Gary Paulsen brings the story to a close that will resound in the hearts of readers for a very long time, unforgettable and deeply sobering for the reality that it so uncompromisingly presents.
In Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl, the middle of the three novellas, we're introduced to Jo, who left her biological family a long time ago. There was too much drinking and abuse for her to survive at home much longer, but she wasn't fated to permanently be without a family. Over time, she adopts stray dogs to keep as her companions, and they are better to her by far than her family ever would have been. To Jo, dogs are infinitely better than people; they don't try to hurt her, they don't ask questions about the life she has chosen and try to get her back living with people, and they never attempt to conceal anything they're feeling from her. Dogs are the ideal companion for Jo, the only friends she ever wanted, until the day that brings a girl named Rose across their path as they're out walking. Rose isn't like the other kids that Jo has observed at school; she's quiet, honest and doesn't ask too many personal questions. Jo has never seen the need to add any humans to her canine circle of friends, but the dogs like Rose, and for reasons that she can't yet fully explain, Jo likes her, too. Though the dogs may still be the ideal companions for Jo after the abuse she endured at the hands of her parents, the only humans with whom she had ever lived, perhaps there's still a little bit of elasticity left in her willingness to give a human a chance to befriend her.
But even as Rose becomes a part of the group, and Jo sees that not all people are dumb, mean and unable to really listen, there's an inherent expiration date on the new friendship that neither Jo nor Rose can do anything to prevent. Sometimes when a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, a piece that you didn't even recognize was missing from the larger picture until you had it in your hand and were able to get a feel for it, that piece is suddenly confiscated in a way that couldn't have been foreseen. But how can one then go back to the picture as it was before, when the need for that missing piece wasn't even on one's radar, and think as before that the puzzle is complete and doesn't need anything extra? The path of the future is always a crooked one, winding and cutting and making shear drop-offs without warning so that there's no way of looking ahead and seeing where it might take you, but a severe jolt up ahead, even if one sees it coming and dreads the impact, doesn't have to lessen what one has right now and can still enjoy before the moment that will change it all. For Jo, her dogs know all about this, knew the uncertainty of the future with Rose before its reality ever dawned on Jo, and it's the dogs who can help them draw together and figure out what happens next. As has been the case for most of her life, the dogs will always be there for Jo. As she, herself, says: "They never hurt anyone and they know everything there is about love and all they want is to help us not be alone and scared. They never give up."
In the third novella, Erik's Rules, we're introduced to a couple of brothers who, like Jo in her story, have run away from abusive parents. Jamie and his older brother, Erik, have had to stay one step ahead of the law ever since they ditched their parents. It's a lot safer living on the streets than it would be trying to continue on at home, but now life is an endless stream of hard work for Erik, who at age seventeen is responsible for all of his little brother's needs and can't afford to take even one day off a week from his three daily jobs. It takes smarts to live as Erik and Jamie do, Jamie still going to school but always having to be on the alert that someone might be on to his home situation. Though he wants to make it so that they don't have to steal or cheat to survive, Erik has had to manipulate a number of official information sources to protect their tenuous arrangement, including buying a fake driver's license so that the whole deal doesn't collapse if he's ever pulled over by the police. Their car is technically stolen, too, swiped from their mother's boyfriend, but he's not likely to raise the alarm on a hunk of junk that was illegally owned, so they're probably fairly safe on that end.
Drawing has always been the way that Jamie releases the raw emotions that build up inside of him, spilling out in black and white so that they don't come out in less appropriate ways. Drawing, and watching the dogs being walked at the dog park, which one day leads him to meet a man named Greg with a fistful of dogs on leashes who seems very interested in Jamie's artwork. Erik has warned Jamie countless times about staying away from troublesome individuals who could do him more harm than even their parents, but Greg seems trustworthy. Seeing the quality of Jamie's drawings, particularly the sharp imagery of his renderings of the dogs, Greg offers him a job sketching the canine residents at the shelter where he works, which he hopes will be much better in representing the personalities of the dogs than the lackluster photographs that he's been using. Jamie knows that the extra money would be a huge help to him and his brother, but what he doesn't know is that when Greg figures out the truth about how the brothers are living, there may be something even more significant that he can do to be of aid to them. Homeless life, bouncing from one temporary shelter to another all the time with little respite, could be over for Jamie and Erik if all goes well. And there's one more thing that Greg can contribute to their arrangement, if they're willing to take a chance on someone very important.
While some of Erik's Rules, sprinkled throughout the text of the story, appear limited chiefly to life on the run, all of them have at least some application to regular life, able to teach us something valuable that we may have known but not quite fully understood. Still, it's not one of Erik's rules, but an observation made by Jamie about homeless life, that sticks out most in my mind: "Quick fixes are the only thing I've got these days." I've never been homeless, but I sure know what it's like to feel like the solutions I think up to my problems are nothing but an unending series of quick fixes, stopgap measures that do nothing to permanently address the issues even as they keep it together for one more day. I guess that's how life tends to go, the possibility for perfection in anything becoming just a distant memory as one settles more and more for the imperfection of band-aid solutions. It's not ideal, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and at the end of the day sometimes that's all that matters.
To me, the story that really seems to stand out as different from the other two is the first one, Man of the Iron Heads. Its intensity has a completely different feel; while I would never think to compare the other two novellas to the work of Robert Cormier, the elements of the first story that brought that comparison to mind for me were impossible to miss. Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl and Erik's Rules have a more hopeful spirit about them than Man of the Iron Heads, but there's little doubt in my mind that the first novella is the best of the bunch, and its effect on me will last much longer than that of the other two. While sometimes brutal and often disturbing, the stories in this collection are remarkably realistic, never sacrificing the grittiness of authentic narrative for a feel-good ending if it doesn't fit. I'm always amazed by how good Gary Paulsen's writing consistently tends to be despite the fact that he has written hundreds of books, somehow not sacrificing quality of ideas for quantity of material, and Paintings from the Cave is another fine work that deserves mention on the same level as some of his classics. I would give it three and a half stars."
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October 20, 2023Title: An Insight into "Paintings from the Cave" by Gary Paulsen
"Paintings from the Cave" by Gary Paulsen is a remarkable anthology of three short stories that collectively provide a vivid image of the struggles, fears, and hopes that define the lives of disadvantaged kids.
The book opens with the story "Man Of The Iron Heads," which revolves around Jake, a teenager who lives with his aunt who is an alcoholic and who doesn't pay attention to him. Jake believes that if you stop moving you're done, he believes this because of his fear of a character named blade. Blade is a criminal, a drug dealer who has a lot of power and who scares Jake. Blade is never arrested and is always looking for people to do his jobs, Jake tries to avoid him the best he can but eventually he catches up to him. And Jake ends up working for Blade in the end.
The second story introduces us to a young girl named Jo and just like Jake she isn't in a very good living situation. Jo lives in a trailer with her mom and dad who are alcoholics and terrible parents. Her parents are always fighting but Jo distracts herself from her life by surrounding herself with dogs. She takes her dogs on daily walks to the woods where she meets another girl named Rose that loves dogs just as much as Jo. They quickly became friends but not long after Jo learned that Rose had been diagnosed with leukemia. And in the end rose passes away.
Finally, the book concludes with a story about a girl named Jamie. Just like Jo she has a strong love for dogs. Unfortunately Jamie and her older brother were being abused, so they decided to move out. Her older brother Erik got two jobs to support them, he was constantly working and always strict about money. One day Jamie found herself drawn to a local dog park, where she would sit for the day drawing portraits of the dogs she saw. She was eventually noticed by a volunteer for a dog shelter, and he said he would give her ten dollars for each portrait she drew. He believed that the portraits could help find the dogs new homes.
One of the most impressive aspects of Paulsen’s work in "Paintings from the Cave" is his ability to create deeply empathetic characters. Paulsen used the theme of poverty and homelessness coupled with the subjects of animal companionship and art therapy, this makes the book a very unique and very good read. The book brings light to some of the struggles young kids face in life, but it also shows how they push through it and make the best of the situation they are in.
In conclusion, "Paintings from the Cave" is a deeply moving anthology that sheds light on the harsh realities of disadvantaged kids, but also emphasizes the resilience of the human spirit. Gary Paulsen’s powerful storytelling and compelling characters make this book a very good read.
"Paintings from the Cave" by Gary Paulsen is a remarkable anthology of three short stories that collectively provide a vivid image of the struggles, fears, and hopes that define the lives of disadvantaged kids.
The book opens with the story "Man Of The Iron Heads," which revolves around Jake, a teenager who lives with his aunt who is an alcoholic and who doesn't pay attention to him. Jake believes that if you stop moving you're done, he believes this because of his fear of a character named blade. Blade is a criminal, a drug dealer who has a lot of power and who scares Jake. Blade is never arrested and is always looking for people to do his jobs, Jake tries to avoid him the best he can but eventually he catches up to him. And Jake ends up working for Blade in the end.
The second story introduces us to a young girl named Jo and just like Jake she isn't in a very good living situation. Jo lives in a trailer with her mom and dad who are alcoholics and terrible parents. Her parents are always fighting but Jo distracts herself from her life by surrounding herself with dogs. She takes her dogs on daily walks to the woods where she meets another girl named Rose that loves dogs just as much as Jo. They quickly became friends but not long after Jo learned that Rose had been diagnosed with leukemia. And in the end rose passes away.
Finally, the book concludes with a story about a girl named Jamie. Just like Jo she has a strong love for dogs. Unfortunately Jamie and her older brother were being abused, so they decided to move out. Her older brother Erik got two jobs to support them, he was constantly working and always strict about money. One day Jamie found herself drawn to a local dog park, where she would sit for the day drawing portraits of the dogs she saw. She was eventually noticed by a volunteer for a dog shelter, and he said he would give her ten dollars for each portrait she drew. He believed that the portraits could help find the dogs new homes.
One of the most impressive aspects of Paulsen’s work in "Paintings from the Cave" is his ability to create deeply empathetic characters. Paulsen used the theme of poverty and homelessness coupled with the subjects of animal companionship and art therapy, this makes the book a very unique and very good read. The book brings light to some of the struggles young kids face in life, but it also shows how they push through it and make the best of the situation they are in.
In conclusion, "Paintings from the Cave" is a deeply moving anthology that sheds light on the harsh realities of disadvantaged kids, but also emphasizes the resilience of the human spirit. Gary Paulsen’s powerful storytelling and compelling characters make this book a very good read.
October 25, 2017
Jake is a kid that grew up alone and is trying to survive against a gang that run by Blade. His only friend is a girl that has trouble with her mother. Jake has a strategy to avoid Blade's men by keep moving. Once you stop, you're done. Jo Jo is a girl, who's parents that are either drunk or asleep, that she has to hide in her room without anything to comfort her. But she kept her head when she found three different dogs in different times. Jamie is a boy who is living alone with his bigger brother; they ran away from their mother. Jamie has spent his life under his brother's rule.
I thought the book was pretty good because Jake's survival skills against Blade's gang and his goons. An example is when Jake had to scout ahead to see where Blade's men were and move across the street unseen to get past.
I thought the book was pretty good because Jake's survival skills against Blade's gang and his goons. An example is when Jake had to scout ahead to see where Blade's men were and move across the street unseen to get past.
December 14, 2021
This book left me with a lasting impression I don't think any other novel could obtain. It had entrapped me from the first page and I fell deep into the stories that seemed too personal to be complete fiction. I could relate so heavily to the characters of these novellas, it was almost suffocating.
I'm still only a teen, but when I was younger I often faced the cruel reality of the people around me. So I kept to literature as a means to escape. Seeing these characters find their own utopias touched my inner soul in such a way I don't know how I lived without knowing this book existed.
I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. It's a must-read that nobody should live without. Though, I will say, it is quite the tearjerker. It tugs at my heartstrings just right every read, and I'm left drowning in my own tears.
I'm still only a teen, but when I was younger I often faced the cruel reality of the people around me. So I kept to literature as a means to escape. Seeing these characters find their own utopias touched my inner soul in such a way I don't know how I lived without knowing this book existed.
I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. It's a must-read that nobody should live without. Though, I will say, it is quite the tearjerker. It tugs at my heartstrings just right every read, and I'm left drowning in my own tears.
February 27, 2023
I recommend this book, Gary Paulsen did an amazing job creating these three different places filled with diverse characters. The novel can move slow at times but if you keep reading it can reveal horrific plot twists. My favorite character was "Man Of The Iron Heads" which will make sense if you read. He showed such caring acts to the protagonist of the first story and had lots of wisdom. As a warning there are some sad events but I think those just show that all people experience pain in their life. Reading this book I saw the different views of the protagonists. They were all unique and well written.
February 26, 2024
This book was sad. It is three short stories in one book. The first story made me cry but the rest of the stories were still sad, but also kind of slow.
This book I would not recommend to everyone because it does deal with very serious and difficult topics in order to bring awareness to people about those around them.
I would say, the first story is a three stars and the second and third are two stars.
If you do decide to read this book, I recommend you research what it’s about before doing so because it does deal with very heavy topics. I had to have another book while reading this to pull me out of these sad stories.
This book I would not recommend to everyone because it does deal with very serious and difficult topics in order to bring awareness to people about those around them.
I would say, the first story is a three stars and the second and third are two stars.
If you do decide to read this book, I recommend you research what it’s about before doing so because it does deal with very heavy topics. I had to have another book while reading this to pull me out of these sad stories.
March 2, 2019
Read the note from Paulsen at the beginning to understand why he wrote these short stories. This book is filled with dark topics and not happy endings. Paulsen stayed true to writing what he knows with a more modern twist, childhood is not always the best of times. Life is not always perfect and does not always end with happy endings, but glimmers of hope can remain even if they are not the typical sunny day dreams.
July 20, 2018
I typically don’t read novellas. But I heard great things about Gary Paulsen, so I decided to read this book. The three short stories were well written and kept my interest. However, I was disappointed that there were swear words and some crude content, seeing that Paulsen’s target audience are young people. I would not want my preteens reading this book.
March 1, 2024
Wow two of the novellas made me cry, all made me sad, the last one warmed my heart. These are stories about forgotten children, who live on the outskirts of society and aren’t treated well at all. Very hard to read such trauma happening to children but this book was so very good. It really touched my heart.
January 19, 2024
This book contains three short stories featuring kids in troubled situations and the dogs that help them. The stories are well written and pull you in, but they are DARK and the endings are left open to interpretation.
June 7, 2017
Great book.
February 23, 2018
Poignant!
July 25, 2017
Ages 14+
March 8, 2018
Gary Paulson is a great writer. This collection of three novellas is deeply touching and makes one aware that too many children live in terrible and confusing circumstances.
May 14, 2018
Perfect for anyone who treasures unexpected friendships in human or dog form. Paulsen's three stories are of children with hard lives and hard circumstances, but kind hearts and hope.
March 8, 2019
Wow! Just wow.
May 1, 2019
Three short and powerful novellas. Could be a good book for reluctant readers or students with difficult home lives. Reads more like SE Hinton than typical Paulsen.
July 24, 2019
Great YAL
July 29, 2019
This book will break your heart over and over again, but it is so very worth it.
September 2, 2019
The answer to our pain is art. And dogs. And art about dogs.
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