My son Jack, a fourth grader, was having a hard time in getting interested in story books recently, so I offered to read the first few chapters to him. In the early pages of 'Incident at Halk Hill', a quiet little boy has a special meeting with a female badger  .Soon after, another badger is caught in a steel leg trap , and the author describes in detail the pain and scare of an animal struggling to its death. We meet the cruel hunter and his ill treatment of a dog; we see the badger being skinned by the boy's father;and we experience the child's confusion when beaten by his father in anger. _ , I thought. Last night , I returned from a weekend away to find that Jack had finished the whole book on his own. "It was really, really good and sad, and violent," he reported. "There was a lot of killing." "Were there any happy parts?" I asked, "The boy's life was saved by the badger, and that was good. But then that badger got caught in a trap again and at the end it's dying, too. " Jack said, "It was so sad that I almost cried. " I told him that many books have made me cry, beginning with Heidi, when I was just his age, right on up to the novel I finished last week. "Well," he admitted then, "I actually did cry. Reading that book just reminded me of all the sadness in the world, and it made me feel sad ,too. " So, I think, now he has been through the sad tone of the passage , the discovery that words on a printed page can give rise to such strong emotion ,that a book can move you right out of your own comfortable little self and into someone else's pain. Thus we come to realize that if we are to remain fully engaged in life, open to its mysteries and feel sorry towards its suffering, we indeed need stories to grab  us by the neck and remind us of the sadness in the world that is not our own. 'Incident at Halk Hill' is a   _  story.
sad happy funny boring