A dark, whimsical adventure that dog-lovers will enjoy.
The life of a young, tormented dog-walker is changed by the people and pets he encounters.
Benny has always felt that he was different than the other residents of his small town of Mayfield, Md.; however, he feels a close connection to the loving, loyal canine members of the community. Becoming a dog-walker was just as much a natural choice for dog-loving Benny as it was a necessity for him as a high-school dropout who has been walked over by the people he has known throughout his young life. Alvarez entices readers to see the town of Mayfield through the eyes of Benny as he creates a kinship with the dogs he walks for his neighbors and takes uncharted paths, twists and turns that give way to new adventures. Through Benny, a lone wolf whose friends and family members cannot compare to his love interest, Laura—the forlorn, anorexic prostitute with the “Husky blue eyes”—Alvarez appealingly flaunts the charm, sincerity and patriotism that exists in the heart of the young man. Although Benny displays a subconscious loyalty to his new crush, there are disturbing problems that arise with courting her. Along with his sharply crafted witticisms and creative analogies, Alvarez creates compelling parallels between the relationships that Benny forges with the people of Mayfield and the ones he forges with the dogs that he walks for them. As Benny explores himself through the challenges he faces in each chapter, he meets new members of his small-town community, and, as he grows, he is increasingly able to lend a helping hand. There's Vanessa, the bold, resourceful owner of recalcitrant Ruckus; Gale, the buxom, beautiful owner of Remy and Shadow and girlfriend of a disrespectful brute; Larry, a war veteran with a wild imagination; and Mrs. McKenzie, the owner of toy poodles, with whom she enjoys drinking beer. And then there's Benny's friend Zach, the sneaky drug dealer, who introduces Benny to Laura. Alvarez expertly uses dark humor to mold Benny into an engaging character who works to save his employers and friends.
A dark, whimsical adventure that dog-lovers will enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466319752
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bell Bridge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
