There came a time when a scrap thrown in his direction usually bounced unseen off his head. Yet put a pork roast in the oven and the guy still breathed as audibly as an obscene caller. The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff. When it stops, I thought more than once, then we’ll know.
There’s not a whole lot to this book in some ways. It clocks in at under a hundred pages and it has many pages that are entirely dedicated to pictures of dogs. I imagine most people could read through it in half-an-hour. It is, mainly, an ode to the author’s beloved Black Lab, Beau. It is, in a larger sense, about the two gifts that good dogs bring to people: the joy of their lives and the sorrow of their deaths. This book doesn’t exactly have anything new to say about the process of loving a dog and then losing them, but Quindlen is a good writer and she’s able to be warm and empathetic without ever being cheesy or saccharine. So, while the book is a light read in some ways, it does tug the heartstrings. I suspect most people reading this review have loved and lost a beloved pet along the way and this book accurately gets at those emotions while also reminding us of how blessed we are to have those pets in the first place. I mean, yeah, I teared up. It’s hard not to. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – slim volume is a tribute to beloved pets and a meditation on the pain of losing them; readable in half-an-hour or so, but it succeeds at tugging the heartstrings. 3 ½ stars.