This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been. It’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of the child I once was, and the bottomless, unfathomable desires that once haunted me. There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that love, which was once so fragile, and so fierce. Sometimes it seems to fade before me, like breath on a mirror. But I remember the dogs. In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking column went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. “Everything I know about love,” she writes, “I learned from dogs.” Their love enables us pull off what seem like impossible feats: to find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.
I received this book from Celadon Books in return for a review, so thank you to the team at Celadon!
I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to find when I read this book, beside the tale of a boy and his dogs that at some point became the tale of a young woman and her dogs. It was that. It was a talk about how a boy/woman interacted with her family and dogs and her struggle with herself.
The book was decent. I didn't quite care for when she would suddenly just drop into an entirely different memories from her past that sometimes only vaguely had any connection to the story she was actually telling us at that moment. I enjoyed Jennifer Finney Boylan's fiction work Long Black Veil, but I'm thinking her memoirs just aren't for me.
Now I picked this up because I have transgender (MtF) friends. I thought this may give me more insight into what's going on in their heads. Not really? It just read like one of them was talking at me and was kind of going off on tangents now and then. It wasn't nearly as good as I had been hoping. We are introduced to the seconds in the forms of the dogs that she got during that time in her life. From Playboy the dalmatian up to Ranger the black lab. I liked the way the dogs did help her learn about herself, but I don't think this is a book I am likely to revisit in the future.
Reading the book brought back a few memories of my own. I know some of the places she's been. While I've never actually been to Maine, I have been to New Jersey every year for nearly twenty-five years. I've been to Lucy the Elephant. Somewhere I have pictures of myself and my sister in the top. So that was fun. It's not often that I actually recognize places that are in books. I rarely get to say "hey, I've been there!" while I'm reading.
Overall, I rated this book a 4/5 because I enjoyed the fact that she did come into her own. I just wanted to learn more either about the dogs and how she cared for them or about how they helped her be more true to herself. Less just random information about things that were only tenuously connected.
