Customer Reviews

Dog

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Read this book with a glass of wine and an animal you love in your lap. Usually, I get books at the library, but this one's worth buying because it's the only coffee table book I own that people actually read. You can't resist picking it up because the pup on the cover is so cute, and then you start reading it, and the story is every bit as loveable and uplifting. The story pulls you straight through, just like Phil pulls Jill on their walks: all the way until midnight, through warm memories and cold weather, and afterwards you know you're a fuller person for having experienced the trip.

I'm not usually much of a dog person (cats have always been my thing) but I love Michelle Herman's book about the relationship between a woman and her dog. Herman's prose is elegant at every turn, and the portrait she draws of the friendship between a person and her pet is engaging and nuanced. In the main character, Jill, I recognize myself-not because I'm a college professor or a poet-but because I too am someone who has found my heart expanded and changed by my relationship to animals. This book strikes an extremely relevant chord in that each moment (written in Herman's witty, sympathetic, beautiful prose) illustrates just how hard it can be for us humans to grope our way toward intimacy and connectedness with others. What I love best about this book is the way it confronts that human difficulty with honesty and humor and gives hope that one dog can put us on the right track to opening up our hearts, even to the grouches out there and the grouches inside ourselves.

This is the sort of book you don't put down until you're done. This is the sort of book you try to tell your friends about but can't quite describe why it's so good.

Michelle Herman is an author for people who really LOVE books. She writes about real, full characters who do the things that you do and feel the things that you feel, and she writes about them in a way that make them seem new and beautiful again. Herman treats each line as if it were a poem, meticulously choosing each word to say exactly what she means to.

Herman proves again and again that it's the getting there that matters, that the little things we experience along the way are the things that shape us. She's honest. She's funny. She makes you want to be a writer yourself.

"Dog" is a simple little story about a woman who buries herself in her relationship with her dog. What could possibly be "irrelevant" about this is beyond me. No, Jill (our heroine, if we decide to call her that) does not scale any mountains; no she does not run for any kind of political office. Her life is ordinary and simple but if it's "irrelevant" than so is mine and more than likely yours. The relationship between Jill and her dog, aptly named Phil, is sweet and true and it's one that any pet owner would recognize. It's not a long book, but I was carried along every page of the way.

I wish I could write as clearly as Michelle Herman in writing my review of her book Dog. I loved this book. Not only because I related with so much of JT's relationship with Phil but I simply LOVED Michelle Herman's writing style.

It is a very quick read. As soon as I finished it, I started reading it again. I didn't want it to end.

I picked up this book for the adorable dog on the cover. (Yes, I judged a book by its cover!) Plus, I am a dog lover ... well, I love MY dog. :)

This is not my usual reading. But the cover was cute enough and the story short enough to entice me. I gave it 5 stars, based on the superb writing talent of the author. The books is not so much about the dog as it is about the woman who adopts this dog. (But there is plenty of dog story in here to keep the dog lovers entertained). Michelle Herman captures the life of this woman perfectly. She captures the bonding of the woman and the dog in the pages perfectly as well.

She mentions that the book was inspired by the dog that her daughter adopted. I wonder if the cover pic is that dog. What a cutie, either way!

My sister-in-law sent me this book after reading a review in Bark magazine. She said it reminded her of my relationship with my dog, Wilson. It's a very short book, one you can read in a single sitting or two if you feel like it (I read it on the Path train, half one way, half the other!) and it made me cry, not because it was sad, because it isn't. It's just that Wilson has been my best friend since he was a puppy, and at a time when I was going through some real difficulties, I felt as if he'd saved my life. Or my soul. Jill in this book needs her puppy as much as I'd needed mine, but she expresses it a lot better than I ever could. (My sister-in-law loves her dogs, too. But she has a husband and two sons. It's different for her. Still, I'm thinking of sending her a copy right back.)

Jill ("J.T.") Rosen is a published poet, and a professor at a well-known Ohio university. Despite living a competent and successful life, she is alone as she approaches middle age, and finds that her tidy and circumscribed existence in the Midwest is getting a little desperate around the edges.

She types the words "adoption", '"foster" and "home" into a Google search, and thus finds a path not to a human companion, but to "Dog", a brindle-colored puppy in a shelter. She renames the pup "Phil", which also happens to be the name of one of her ex-lovers.

This book is quietly lyrical and a bit somber, much like the Midwestern landscape it is set within. With a poet's sensitivity, it examines the way dogs and their owners reflect each other's personalities. Jill and "Phil" tread lightly around the house, taking care--an effort that Jill is not really sure she is worthy to attempt.

Of course, any reader will be convinced that Jill is more than worthy, and will be touched by this carefully written journey into one woman's heart, as she and her pet monitor each other, and push each other forward. Very simple, and very deep, and so intimate that you almost can hear the heartbeats of the characters as you read.

It is no wonder that Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee enjoyed this novel so much; it succeeds in the ways that many of Coetzee's best novels do: being able to perfectly and thoroughly reveal a character's inner life; portraying unique and eccentric characters with sympathy and pathos; capturing the "feel" of a place--in this case, the cold Midwest; having something important to say, and saying it.

Dog is, as its cover explains, "a short novel." Yet it faces head-on the most significant of matters--about growing older, about relationships, about attempting to answer the question, "How in the world did I end up here?" It is a wholly original, astute, satisfying, one-sitting novel. Read it.

I had to respond to the grouchy guy below. I know the author--she was my teacher at Ohio State!!--and I've got to say that there is nothing irrelevant about this book OR either of the wonderful characters in it--the poet-professor and the dog. JM Coatzee, who won a Nobel prize and is maybe the greatest living writer in the WORLD right now says right on the back cover that the dog in this book is his favorite "male character" in a book lately!!! And the "middle aged never married childless academic" share a lot of traits with an awful lot of people I know. I'm getting close to middle aged myself, and I am SINGLE and childless and there's nothing irrelevant about that, or about me.

Also--and I admit I could be prejudiced, because I was one of Prof Herman's students when she first started teaching--the way the character's students are portrayed was as loving and kind as I have ever seen college students written about. That's one of the best things about this book, and it has nothing to do with the dog. That even though it's kind of an academic satire (the English professors in it don't come off so well), the students are written about so tenderly. I don't remember ever being so smart or interesting when I was a college student.