The Dog I Loved: A Novel
By: Susan Wilson / Narrated By: Christina Delaine
Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
Not my favorite Susan Wilson, but boy was I needing the great dogs in this audiobook!!!
I’ve listened to three Susan Wilson “dog” books, have read four, and I’d have to say that The Dog I Loved is maaaaybe my second favorite? I don’t know; it’s not like I dislike any of them—it’s just that Wilson has a tendency of going for the easy fixes where her plots and storylines are concerned. There’s usually a great deal that happens, many many many words that are written, then WHAM! An oh so instantaneous Happily Ever After.
Now please believe me when I say I’m all ABOUT the Happily Ever After (What lover of Regency Romances can say she’s not?!?); it’s just that, especially in Wilson’s case, the story is built up, layer by loving layer, to where the ending should be way up there at the tippy-top rather than boom: Right at eye level. Does that make sense?
More words, I say: More words! An extra chapter before the Epilogue, please!
Still, abrupt ending or not, this book really helped me get my Animal Ya-Ya’s out for this week’s Animals audiobook pick. Wilson writes dog behavior so well (And boy do I miss my dogs when I read her work!) that we really don’t even need the short chapters written from the dogs’ eyes (Here: Service dog, Shark and dark guardian, Shadow). But they’re fun chapters to have mostly because…
This is my second audiobook with Christina Delaine, here as main narrator rather than as part of a duo carrying the whole story. Boy is she AWEsome, or what?!? Trust me when I say that Wilson’s books are always chockfull o’ diversity, and Delaine performs each character with such ease, switching between tones, switching between twangs, switching between accents. She does Rosie’s prison mates, Meghan and her family, men, women, a voice of a woman from long ago as expressed through journal entries; you name it, you’ve got it—all flowing with spunk and with ease.
Rosie is in prison for killing her boyfriend (No, really, of COURSE it was an accident), and after several lonely years, she’s given a chance to take part in a program to train pups to become Service or Therapy or Emotional Support dogs. Her first pup, a lover named Shark, soon grows to become Meghan’s dog. Meghan is back in the States, crippled, scarred, angry, after an explosion while serving in Iraq. Meghan is thaaaaat close to an opioid addiction, is floundering, and the meet and greet and extensive training she gets from Rosie to transfer Shark to her bonds the two women closely. Each of them is wounded and suffering some PTSD (Rosie’s boyfriend was brutally manipulative and emotionally abusive), and they can meet each other on this strangely level playing field: Wounded Warrior with the Wounded Prisoner.
Things work out where Rosie is released from prison through the intervention of an Advocacy group, and she is given a job on the edges of a place locally known as Dogtown (It has a prior history of castoff women and crones and widows living there, solitary except for companion dogs. These women were shunned as witches and the like).
Rosie and Meghan remain friends; Rosie soon has a dog she calls Shadow; Meghan gains a sense of new life via her dog, Shark.
And that’s about it, really.
I read one reviewer say that it was a MEH book in that the women really needed to be stronger, but I’m over here thinking: Dude! That was the point! The women were weak and broken, and through friendship and care for and guidance from their dogs, they become stronger and more whole. So, actually, don’t expect a lot plot wise, just know that you’re going into this for a couple of large slices of In The Lives Of Two Shattered Women. I LIKED how things flowed smoothly and slowly; I liked how the women started making better choices, started facing fear as though the adrenaline surge was an AWEsome prod in the rear.
And so suuuuue me. I LOVED the dogs (Y’all know I’m a sucker for a good tale of rescue and redemption).
So yeh yeh yeh. Maybe a bit could’ve been edited out of the middle of this 11 hour Listen…
…But I’m sure glad it wasn’t…
Just more words at the end there, Ms. Wilson, more words!!!
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