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THE DOG AT THE GATE

HOW A THROWAWAY DOG BECOMES SPECIAL

Movingly conveys a resonant message of empathy for mistreated and abandoned animals.

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In this middle-grade novel, an Australian shepherd poignantly relates his mistreatment as a puppy, the love and companionship he finds with a caring owner and other rescued animals, and his life’s surprising last chapter.

Dog lovers be warned: You’ll need to keep the tissues handy while reading the saga of an Australian shepherd’s life and death (and beyond). Told in the heart-tugging voice of Aussie Max, Weber’s (Beyond Flight or Fight: A Compassionate Guide for Working with Fearful Dogs, 2015) novel begins when Max is taken from his mother as a puppy. Relegated to his first human family’s shade-free, barren backyard, Max is subject to increasing neglect. His only moments of affection and companionship come when the family’s unhappy young son occasionally plays outside with him. After a painful encounter with a neighbor’s aggressive dog, Max is beaten and hauled off to an animal shelter, where, confused and depressed, he is marked for death. Life turns around when Max is adopted by a caring, dog-savvy new owner. Gradually adjusting to his extended new family of rescued dogs and cats, he finds his calling as a champion in agility competitions. Weber believably shadows Max’s triumphs and sunny times over the years with a tragedy that befalls his beloved feline companion and with the emotional scars that linger due to the Aussie’s harrowing start in life. The author also doesn’t sugarcoat Max’s last challenge: his wrenching, graphically depicted last illness. Yet Weber never makes Max’s plight feel gratuitous. This touching narrative, with its colorful characters and humane message, conveys Weber’s own love for animals and her experiences with animal rescue and the loss of a pet. And, although readers may go through an emotional wringer throughout, Weber leaves her audience with the comfort of a cathartic last chapter that involves a trip over the “Rainbow Bridge,” joyous reunions, and Max’s new job, tailor-made just for him.

Movingly conveys a resonant message of empathy for mistreated and abandoned animals.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-9966612-4-9

Page Count: 246

Publisher: Pups and Purrs Press

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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