People seem to really like this one. Really? This book? I'm not seeing what you're seeing.

Bullet review:
+Despite my gripes (below), the writing did somehow manage to keep me invested in the story. Was it good? No, if you ask me, but at least I wasn't constantly mentally tuning out.
+I guess the deer and Fodder-wing were the only characters in this I didn't downright hate.
-This book is just. Not very pleasant to read. An uncomfortable amount of time is dedicated to animal killing/hunting or just general mistreatment. Even stuff like Jody and Fodder-wing keeping animals as pets, even if well intentioned, I can't root for since wild animals or exotics as pets are not something that should be encouraged. I kept hoping somehow they would put these poor animals into sanctuaries or something, instead of keeping them as glorified pets. Wild animals deserve to be respected as they are, wild, and seeing them forced into these captive situations, especially when their mothers are killed so the kids can be taken, just made me sad. 
-I genuinely hated 90% of the cast in this book. Penny, Jody, Ora, the Forresters (except Fodder-wing, I guess), pretty much everyone here sucks. I have rarely read a book where I cared so little about both the main and supporting cast. None of these people respect animals, Ora was complaining all the time, Jody and Penny are A-holes who abandon their wife/mother to go bear hunting during (yay, more animal cruelty) on Christmas Eve, Penny and Ora force their son to kill his beloved pet, the Forresters beat up a guy because he likes a certain girl. What a cast of assholes. The only reason Fodder-wing was mildly bearable was because at least he was somewhat nice to the animals (even if he kept them as pets) and then he

died early on

before he could get any worse. 
-Of course this  book wouldn't be complete without the good ol' sexism, racism and ableism. 
-The book is quite frankly, boring. It's a lot of these jerks just hanging around on a farm or in the forest doing shit. Mostly relating to crops or hunting animals. I hated to see so much animal cruelty, and the crops were genuinely boring as hell. And, again, I genuinely couldn't care less if any of these assholes died from starvation due to bad crops because none of these characters are likable.

And the only mildly tolerable ones die

-Flag, the titular deer, does not even have a personality. He feels like a plot point for the characters to deal with, but he has no personality or traits to him. He's just...a deer. Could be any random deer. Nothing sets him apart (aside from him being tame but again, could be any tame deer. Not Flag specifically). I also thought his bond with Jody felt forced and "because plot" and not because of any genuinely meaningful connection.

The reason this has 1.5 stars and not one is because there are books I think are genuinely terrible and worse than this one, but don't let that mean that this is anything remotely good.