Lively writing and flashes of wit make it easy to accompany Needham along the predictable narrative path from new dog owner...
A cat-loving neurotic struggles to raise an unruly German shepherd pup in Needham’s debut “dogoir.”
Needham, a single woman with a steady job, a house and a fenced-in yard, is ready to own a dog. But the ideal dog she imagines is a far cry from the “fluffy terror” of a puppy she ends up buying from a breeder. Smart and slyly disobedient, Athena loves biting fingers, tearing apart household objects and pooping indoors, especially in crowded stores and cafes. Overwhelmed at first, Needham, with the help of a trainer, learns to control and then to adore her energetic, big-hearted goofball of a dog. In caring for Athena, Needham becomes more mature herself. The fact that this story is predictable doesn’t mean it isn’t engaging, although its primary appeal will be to dog lovers and German shepherd aficionados. Needham devotes several chapters to training methods, medical issues that can beset German Shepherds and the raw food doggie diet. There are also tales of Athena’s crowd-pleasing antics at dog shows, an account of the time she saved her owner from a would-be assailant and the running question of whether the author’s elderly cat will ever acquiesce sharing his home with a rambunctious dog. A few sections—such as the one describing four of Athena’s canine pals and analyzing her relationships with them—could have been trimmed. However, the amount of detailed information about what actually goes into raising a dog like Athena makes this a useful book for anyone thinking of getting a German shepherd or other large, energetic dog.
Lively writing and flashes of wit make it easy to accompany Needham along the predictable narrative path from new dog owner coping with a crazy pup to proud owner of an obedient dog.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1467938389
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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SEEN & HEARD
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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