Dog

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.

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.

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.

"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.