"Swamp Water" by Vereen Bell

My goodness, what a change of pace this book was!  It's a coming-of-age story set in and around the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.  It's also a musing on the way people treat each other.  And a fairly deep look at stubbornness and how that character trait can be used for good or for bad.  

Nearly-grown Ben Ragan chases his dog Trouble into the swamp even though his father has forbidden Ben to ever go in there.  Ben encounters a lot of scary things in the swamp, his journey turning kind of mythical for quite a while.  He's eventually captured by Tom Keefer, a fugitive who's wanted for killing his sister's husband (which he definitely did) and stealing a lot of hogs (which he also definitely did).  And yet, Tom Keefer is a more morally upright man than most of the people Ben has known outside the swamp.

Ben and Tom start trapping furs in the swamp together, which earns Ben enough of a living that he can move out of his father's cabin and start courting first one young woman, then another.  A jealous woman spills a secret that puts not only the fur-trapping enterprise in jeopardy, but Tom Keefer's life too.  That leads to a really thrilling manhunt at the end.

I've seen the 1941 movie version of Swamp Water two or three times -- it stars Dana Andrews as Ben and Walter Brennan as Tom, but it diverges from the simplicity of the book's plot, as I recall.  I need to see the movie again because it's probably been ten years since I last watched it, and I don't remember it well enough to compare the two.  I just know I really like the movie, and I really like the book.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for some very mild innuendo, a plot line that involves a man trying to entice a married woman away from her husband, and quite a bit of danger and peril to people and dog, including a near-drowning inflicted on one man by an angry mob.  Might have been some mild cussing too, but I can't recall now, as I read this book about a week ago.

This is my 10th book read for my fourth Classics Club list and my 12th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.