A friend of mine started The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski but couldn’t finish it, and would like to know how it ends. What happens? And did you like the book?
I liked it up until the end, which I thought was ludicrous.
It’s been a year since I read it so my memory’s fuzzy. Basically, Edgar’s uncle kills Edgar’s father fairly early in the story. Edgar knows this but either doesn’t tell anyone or can’t get anyone to believe him (I forget). Edgar’s uncle then wheedles his way into Edgar’s mom’s affections. Edgar’s father appears to him as a ghost. Edgar runs off into the woods, taking a couple of the Sawtelle dogs with him. He wanders, meets a guy who helps him, then decides to go back home.
In the meantime, some doofus cop has decided that Edgar’s responsible for the death of someone he cared about (again, I forget the details). The night Edgar returns home, all hell breaks loose. The cop ends up blinded by something and is wrestling around on the ground with Edgar’s mother while Edgar’s uncle somehow manages to kill Edgar. Everybody else dies too.
The ending was just silly and required a huge suspension of disbelief to put those people in that situation at that time. I imagine Hamlet made sense but I’ve never read or seen Hamlet so I don’t know.
Oh, and the most special dog dies too.
Before the ending, it was a well written coming of age story about a close-knit family who raises dogs, and about a boy coming to terms with the death of his father. The ending made idiots out of all of them. Just MHO.
I loathed the ending. It’s a shame, there was some great prose in the novel but I ended up hating it after the end.
I loved the book but I didn’t like the ending.
The old dog, Almondine, decides to try to find Edgar and is hit by a car and dies.
When Edgar returns home, Edgar’s uncle convinces the cop that he should avenge his father by killing Edgar. In the struggle between Edgar and the cop, Edgar blinds the cop by throwing something (lime?) in his eyes and, at the same time, a fire is started in the barn. The crazed cop wanders off, and Edgar goes into the barn to try to rescue the dogs and all the historic information about the dogs. Uncle takes advantage of the confusion to follow Edgar into the barn and inject him with some poison, killing him. Uncle dies when the barn roof collapses on him. Mother is left screaming insanely while being held back from rescuing either of them by the crazed cop.
The dogs that have been freed from the burning barn gather together and place themselves under the direction of Essay, the dog that Edgar had trained. She leads the dogs off into the woods (or somewhere), accompanied by Forte.