An homage to a beloved canine that will bring readers more laughter than tears.
Lynn’s debut offers a collection of anecdotes, as told from the perspective of a troublemaking dog.
This book is a tribute to the author’s departed dog Bentley, a cute, lovable Airedale who also had his possum-killing and flower-bed-destroying moments over the course of his life. Bentley tells his side of the story in a series of short vignettes from his new home in heaven. In a separate chapter, the cats who lived with Bentley provide their perspectives. The dog describes his different adventures with his human “Mama” and offers advice to other canines, such as, “Jump willingly into the car when your human is taking you to the dog doctor.” Most of his stories involve him getting into some kind of trouble. As they’re told from his point of view, he always attempts to justify his behavior: Although he did bite his Mama’s friend on the head, he admits, he didn’t do so with the intention of hurting him; also, he doesn’t think he should be blamed for once eating his Mama’s eyeglasses, because she was the one who didn’t put them on the shelf, out of his reach. Occasional illustrations, including color photos of Bentley and simple line drawings of an Airedale, accompany the text. The book seems aimed at an adult audience, but its brevity and subject matter would also make it appropriate for younger readers. The overall lighthearted tone, and Bentley’s upbeat attitude in particular, keeps the book from becoming a tear-jerker, as is often the case with books about a deceased pet. In fact, it would likely be enjoyed by those grieving the loss of an animal companion. The book lacks an overarching plot or storyline, but it’s still enjoyable as short, simple descriptions of Bentley’s different activities, told in his own, overconfident style.
An homage to a beloved canine that will bring readers more laughter than tears.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481124430
Page Count: 53
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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
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