DWJ: Dogsbody

By -
I'm skipping yesterday's topic of favorite supporting character because it's impossible and anyway I'm behind.  Right then, on to Dogsbody!

Sirius (yes, the star) has been exiled for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced to live on Earth in a mortal creature's body.  If he can find the thing he lost, he can go free, but otherwise he will die like any other mortal creature.  Naturally, he is born as a dog!  Sirius bonds with his owner Kathleen, lives a dog's life (in both senses), and looks for the Zoi, but it's starting to look like he's been set up.

This is such a funky and pun-filled premise, and DWJ pulls it off beautifully.  It all links up.  I really like recommending this book to DWJ newbies; earlier this year I read it aloud to my semi-reluctant-reader daughter, age 10, and she loved it.  I gave it to a friend looking for read-alouds for his class, and they loved it.  Success!

It's a dog story and not a dog story, which is fun.  I don't particularly care for dogs myself, and I really don't care for dog stories, but this is certainly an exception.  And I am pretty tickled by the fact that at the end, the dog dies...but he doesn't die at all.  I think DWJ was doing a bit of poking at traditional dog stories, don't you?  (Maybe not though.  The dog story where the dog dies at the end does seem to be a particularly American phenomenon.)

In other news, have you all heard about the DWJ conference that will happen in Newcastle in September?  Any British readers should go and report back to those of us who can't pop over for the weekend.

Also, I'm now reading Changeover and it's pretty fun.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 12, 2014 at 4:52 PM

    My favorite thing about Dogsbody is how Sirius develops a rapport with the cats after a while. I like it when they team up to do things.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMarch 13, 2014 at 8:57 AM

    Yep, that is very fun. I love how they talk to each other and make that alliance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kristen M.March 13, 2014 at 11:26 PM

    I want to go to that conference!! It seems like they should want to have me there, you know, as the founder/host of DWJ March, right? I'll have to convince them to fly me out. ;)

    I am not a fan of animal stories either but this book won me over the first time through. I've also recommended it with success. It's not like any other animal story so I think it takes people by surprise.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanMarch 14, 2014 at 1:57 PM

    Kristen, actually I bet that would be a great presentation. I know they are asking for fan presentations as well as academic stuff. Maybe you should do a Kickstarter... :D

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more