Fans of Cameron's series will delight in this latest syrupy installment.
Bailey, an adorable malamute–Great Dane mix, finds his purpose in helping a young boy and his family navigate life’s tribulations.
Cameron (A Dog’s Way Home, 2017, etc.) offers the next in his series of books tracing the reincarnated souls of good dogs who go to heaven but are recalled to Earth as guardian angels of a sort for troubled children. Happily ensconced in dog paradise, filled with toys, sticks, and miles of shoreline to run, Bailey promises his previous owners to be a good dog again for another child. Of course, returning to the mortal realm as a puppy means that Bailey’s memories of his previous lifetimes will be erased—at least until he reunites with his beloved Ethan, his owner from the first book in Cameron’s series. Bailey (renamed Cooper) is given to a paraplegic boy named Burke, who trains him as a service dog. The work pays off when Burke can finally go to a real school, but soon enough, Burke’s family must take on the school district, which opposes having a dog in the classroom. Worse, the Trident Mechanical Harvesting Corporation’s drones have trespassed on the family’s land, prompting Burke’s father to shoot one with his rifle, thus risking a second lawsuit. On the homefront, Burke’s older brother, Grant, is having trouble accepting Burke’s disability. And on the romantic front, Bailey’s love for his soul mate, a boxer named Lacey, inspires both Burke and Grant to find true love, too. Told from Bailey’s perspective, Cameron’s tale reflects on human behaviors that confuse dogs, from the sad capture of Bailey, his mother, and siblings to his adoption by a loving family beset by companies threatening their land and eco-friendly farming practices. The effect is, unfortunately, more juvenile than deeply philosophical.
Fans of Cameron's series will delight in this latest syrupy installment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-16351-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
PROFILES
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.
A debut novel about class strife, masculinity, and brotherhood in contemporary Trinidad.
Adam—herself a native of Trinidad—tells the story of Paul and Peter Deyalsingh, twins of Indian descent whose lives rapidly diverge. Paul is socially awkward, a bundle of nervous tics and strange habits, and from a young age he is dubbed unhealthy by his industrious father, Clyde, who works tirelessly doing physical labor at a petroleum plant in order to afford a better life for his children—or, at least, one of them. As he ages, his family becomes convinced that he is "slightly retarded," and he is marked as doomed in comparison to his precociously intelligent brother, Peter—the "healthy" child. After Peter's unexpected success on a standardized test, Clyde and his wife, Joy, single him out as gifted while communicating to Paul that his possibilities are far more limited. Joy works hard to keep her children together—"The boys are twins. They must stay together," she frequently demands—but Peter's intellectual gifts create a chasm between him and Paul. Peter is destined to leave the island, while Paul's horizon never exceeds hard labor, like his father before him. Despite the efforts of Father Kavanagh, a kindly Irish Catholic priest who takes it upon himself to teach Paul, the family is forced to make an irrevocable decision that will determine the boys' fates. Adam excels at sympathetically depicting the world of economic insecurity, unpredictable violence, limited opportunity, and mutual distrust that forces Clyde and Joy to make their fateful decision. Unfortunately, however, the novel telegraphs its biggest plot twist. One can see the narrative gears turning very early, and as a result Clyde's decision isn't harrowing; by the time its necessary consequences unfold, a reader might be less moved than Adam hopes. It doesn't help that many of the characters are sketchily drawn at best. Clyde, Joy, and Peter are not vividly depicted, and the decision that renders Paul disposable seems to emanate out of a psychological vacuum. In the absence of any emotional stakes, the last third of the novel unfolds like a generic thriller. That's unfortunate, as Adam has otherwise written an incisive and loving portrait of contemporary Trinidad. Paul is the most fully realized character: Adam movingly depicts his struggle to break free of his family's conceptions of his abilities. As a result, the novel is most moving when it becomes a heart-rending character study of post-colonial adolescence that recalls V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming.
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57299-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SJP for Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
© 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.
