Customer Reviews

Border Dogs

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I didn't read this book for an education about the Border Patrol, but because I knew (from All Saints) that the author could tell an absorbing story in a style both lucid and poetic. In my opinion she succeeds beautifully here, leading us gradually to an intimacy with her characters that makes the book's eventual revelations very moving. I confess to having very little particular knowledge of border policing, but I do understand the criminal justice system and the laws governing inheritance, and found Palmer's descriptions of those processes quite precise and reliable. This is a memorable book, thoughtfully and unsentimentally conceived, exquisitely well written.

In this story of a man torn between cultures, choices, and identities, Palmer does an amazing job of continually upping the stakes for James Reese. A series of events--the escalating dangers of his job, his wife's pregnancy, and the death of his birth mother--come together to force him into a harrowing examination of his past. Palmer presents an utterly convincing male narrator whose difficulties are both global and personal. James is a character who will remain in your mind long after you've finished the book.

Furthermore, Border Dogs functions as a beautiful example of how a novel should be written, combining an almost thriller-like sense of tension with a precise yet lyric style. Palmer is both a writer's writer and a reader's writer; her novel is not only a page turner but a lesson in craft.

I bought Border Dogs because I'd been impressed with Ms. Palmer's first novel (All Saints) and had eagerly anticipated the publication of her second. I continue to be surprised at the high literary quality of her work. This novel is set on California's boarder with Mexico, in sister-cities on opposite sides of it, and the no-mans-land between traversed by desperate illegals and the "coyotes" who guide them across. The main character is a border patrol, James Reese, who is the only child of an Anglo/Hispanic marriage. After his Hispanic father was convicted of murder, his mother put him up for adoption, and he was raised by an Anglo couple. Thus James also lives on the boarder between the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. This novel is about identity, and James is also torn between his recent marriage to a Hispanic woman and an old Anglo flame, a blond coworker who undoubtedly reminds him of his mother and the world she represents. An added complication is that he is a member of law enforcement, and this fact adds a special emphasis to the pain he inflicts on the illegals by taking them into custody and returning them to Mexico. James wrestles continually with whether his job is moral or immoral. Thus as James travels back and forth over the border, he also traverses the split in his psychic landscape trying desperately to come to terms with himself, his job and his past.

The quality of Ms. Palmer's writing is superb, even poetic. She can hold her own with the best in the business. Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Alice McDermott have nothing on her. Her descriptions at times will take your breath away, and her fluency in Spanish makes the Hispanic culture come to life with blazing reality. But the most pleasant surprise for me in this novel was Ms. Palmer's portrayal of the antagonist, an astronomer who is his Hispanic uncle. For me, he is the most powerful character in the novel, possibly because I've taught astronomy at the university level. As a scientist at a major university, James' uncle is a researcher into the mysteries of Dark Matter, a substance that makes up most of the universe, yet has eluded detection by all of NASA's telescopes. Even quantum physics makes a cameo role in the form of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal, which is used by the uncle to further cloud James' mind with what is real and unreal, what is certain and what is unknowable. The reader gets the feeling that somewhere within this astronomer's research lies the answer to James' search for his own identity.

I had to chuckle at another of the reviews of Border Dogs here on Amazon because the reviewer is a border patrol and takes exception to how they are portrayed in this novel. As an astronautical engineer, I have winced many times at how my profession is portrayed in literature, but one day I came to the realization that no one within a profession has the same experience, and the way it's viewed from outside is always strange to those within it. And of course, any human activity taken into the fictional world develops an unreal quality about it. I'm reminded that Steinbeck caught it from both migrant farm workers (Okies) and the large land owners for his portrayal of them in The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which brought Steinbeck a Nobel Prize.

Border Dogs is a marvelous novel. Any reader of serious literature will find that this is a novel to really sink your teeth into.

I am not a professional reviewer and do not know much about border agents and patrolling, but there is something I do know about, and that is life sure can throw some tough curve balls at you. I think Palmer brilliantly depicts the vagaries of life, the insecurities which we all face in our love, our work, and relationships. Her protagonist is an imperfect man trying to find the right path in a world that surrounds him with deceit and danger. I can identify with that.
Palmer's language is real, her characters true, her descriptions so compelling that I can taste the grit, the dust, the ash on my tongue as her character traverses the desolate landscape of the desert as well as the haunting shadows of his life.
I actually enjoyed this book more than All Saints, and I loved that book as well. Looking foward to a third novel from this exceptional writer.

Written by an outsider, this book is full of minor inaccuracies on the Border Patrol, but I can live with that. What upsets me is that the plot of this novel is unbelieveable, which ruins it for me.

The plot is hard to follow. You find yourself flipping back & forth, trying to remember who so-and-so is or what happened to who. The characters are stereotypes for the most part, and not even entertaining ones. Another big problem is the pace, which is sloooow, sloooow, fast, slooow. Very frustraiting. I found myself skimming instead of reading in many places.

The editorial review says that the author did a good job describing the life & work of Border Patrolmen. Well, as a Border Patrol AGENT, I hated to see so many technical mistakes. Slang is wrong, job duties are screwed up, description of the equipment is way out there, and worst of all, the characters don't act like any agents I know. The BP doesn't employ photographers (the main character's love-interest), the INS doesn't have pilots (they're BP agents), and dispatchers don't call out "sector coordinates" when sensors are activated. And I'll never understand why the horse patrol was out fighting fires!

DON'T BUY THIS THINKING YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN ABOUT THE WORLD OF BP AGENTS! Besides the inaccuracies, it is only about 8% about Border Patrol.

It comes close, but for me, not close enough.
However, for the moment, this is the only fictional book I have seen on the BP, and I give the author credit for that.
I paid ... for this book and think I barely got my money's worth. If you're an agent or wanna-be, you probably won't care for this one.

The Border Patrol has been all but invisible in the area of pop culture. I only know of only two movies about the Border Patrol (Borderline and The Border) which came out in the early 80s and this ONE novel. That's pathetic, since I'm going to be a Border Patrol Agent and am looking for some fictional material to psych me up. Border Dogs does indeed portray the dangers that the BP face in their duties, and Reese is shown to be a stalwart hero.
Karen Palmer wrote a great murder mystery, primarily in the subtleties of the characters' actions and words in the story. She knows enough not to hit her reader over the head with an explanation for everything, but lets the pieces slowly, but eventually, form together in the reader's mind. I was totally impressed by Palmer's skilled grasp for vivid detail of, not only the desolate California and Mexican environments, but of the characters' appearances. Overall, Border Dogs does suck you in like a good, solid story should.
The only reason why I didn't give it a higher review was because of (I kid you not) the last FOUR pages. The writer sandbags the reader with her liberal viewpoints on immigration and ultimately casts aside the important role the U.S. Border Patrol plays. If you're a conservative and read this book, you'll know what I'm talking about.