A handy and often entertaining primer for brand-new and longtime dog owners alike.
Troy’s helpful guide provides tips on training and caring for our faithful canine companions.
An American cocker spaniel named Dylan takes a detour from the fictional series he headlines. In this book, Troy—the author of that series and the real-life Dylan’s owner—fields fans’ dog-related questions and addresses their concerns. The book is styled as a series of letters written to Dylan’s Dog Squad, who happily reply to each letter. One couple who took in a late neighbor’s dachshund puppies wonders what the best age is to neuter or spay; for this and other questions, the members of Dylan’s Dog Squad encourage readers to seek advice from a veterinarian or ask friends who are “dog people” to recommend a local vet. The letters cover a wide range of subjects, including training (crate, potty, and leash), whether or not an Irish setter should poke her head out of a car window while on the road, and the case of a visiting relative’s Boston terrier who marks his territory all over the host’s residence. The responses are thoughtful and clearly explained throughout—and, when necessary, blunt. (To the owner whose dog has been snacking on shoes, dirty socks, and wet bath towels: “Pick up your stuff.”) Along with the Q&A sections, the book includes valuable tips delivered in a bullet-pointed format. Readers will learn what things to consider when adopting a dog and ways to make a new puppy happy (“Introduce him to your home one room at a time”).
Troy’s concise, easygoing prose is familiar from Dylan’s earlier fictional adventures. In one particularly notable section, she lists specific pointers on various canine commands such as “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “come”; her simple directions will surely make learning a breeze for humans and dogs alike. (The author clarifies that humans need to practice as much as their furry loved ones.) This guidebook is rife with heartfelt moments—like letters from owners who’ve lost a beloved dog—as well as genuinely curious cases, like that of a pug who, on the basis of smell, isn’t very fond of his humans’ 10-month-old granddaughter. Some of the letters to Dylan’s Dog Squad are quite amusing: One owner laments that a park ranger cited him for an unleashed dog; now his Weimaraner has a rap sheet. Another tells of a greyhound mix scraping her humans’ legs with her cone of shame—apparent payback for being made to wear it. While some of Troy’s advice understandably overlaps (“yummy treats” make an especially effective motivator), parts of the book are outright repetitive; for example, details on all 10 of the American Kennel Club’s Canine Good Citizen tests are repeated almost verbatim. The author rounds out this relatively short book with recipes for doggie pupsicles (peanut butter and blueberry) and a list of American Sign Language commands that owners can teach their dogs—and that Dylan, both real and fictional, has mastered.
A handy and often entertaining primer for brand-new and longtime dog owners alike.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
In Geller’s debut novel, a husband and wife face tough decisions when doctors diagnose their young son with a rare liver disease.
Marcia and Michael Kleinman’s marriage—already sailing on rough waters—hits the rocks when a sudden onset of jaundice sends their son, Max, to the doctor. Initially inconclusive, tests eventually show a rare condition that will likely require a liver transplant. This crisis forces Marcia, the novel’s protagonist, to face the problems in her marriage and her dissatisfaction with life in general. Her mother was once a classical pianist (she recorded a few albums that “didn’t sell particularly well”), and Marcia also dreamed of a career as a musician, until marriage and motherhood sidetracked her. Now, faced with an ailing son, she plays piano again, finding release in her attempts to master some of Beethoven’s most challenging sonatas. Author Geller understands the drive of the artist. “It’s not the notes exactly,” Marcia says; it’s “capturing it. Capturing the music.” A neat sentiment—the difference between knowing technique and knowing music lies in the heart of the true artist—but one that perhaps underlines a problem with this novel: Sometimes it feels like Geller knows the notes but lacks the music. As such, the interpersonal notes—the overbearing mother, the distant husband, etc.—feel over-rehearsed, rote and drained of invention, leading to a finale that flirts with melodrama. Yet the novel succeeds because Geller, a pathologist, spends most of his time focused on a realm he understands very well: the world of medicine. There aren’t many works of fiction that focus so completely—and so devastatingly—on the process of illness: the meetings, the waiting, the diagnoses, etc. All of this is communicated with the cool tone of a great doctor giving a patient the bad news while looking her in the eye.
Medical drama outweighs interpersonal drama in this affecting debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1481762328
Page Count: 290
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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