Author: Pam Torres
Publisher: Legacy Media Press
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Tomorrow! Russ Ryan, author of It's Just a Dog goes paw to paw with with Pam Torres, author of It's NOT Just a Dog!
The first thing I noticed about this novel is how poorly formatted it is for the Kindle; indeed, it's not formatted at all, at least for my rather antiquated model. There are words which run together (which any spell-checker ought to catch), and lines which are broken half-way along. Periodically the author's name appeared, presumably snitched from the page header, but in the Kindle, it was randomly appearing in the text at various places on the screen. Hopefully those issues will not be a problem in the final version of this novel.
For some reason, perhaps to try and connect with the youth generation, the author decided to post hash-tagged comments randomly in the text, as a short-hand indicating the narrator's state of mind, but these were a fail for me, especially in the Kindle where they ran into the rest of the text. They seemed out of place, and much more like a gimmick than an integral part of the story.
Maybe others will like them, but I have to wonder how many people of this age (11) are actually involved in Twitter. I don't use it myself. Twitter is for twits! I liked the take on it in the Doctor Who Episode The Bells of Saint John where the Doctor says, "This whole world is swimming in wi-fi; we're living in a wi-fi soup. Suppose something got inside it? Suppose there was something living in the wi-fi, harvesting human minds; extracting! Imagine that: human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck forever, crying out for help!" whereupon his companion, Clara responds immediately: "Isn't that basically Twitter?". I laughed my patootie off at that one.
But I digress. As usual. You know, if I were to tally-up the number of times I digressed...but I digress again! So, having said all that, and with some reservations about eleven-year-olds becoming involved in directly investigating dangerous men who are training dogs to fight, I actually enjoyed the story rather a lot, and thought that it was a perfectly fine and interesting yarn. There was lots going on, interesting and gripping situations arising, and there was a significant educational content.
The basic story is that of Madison, and 11 year old who lives with her dad and her pet dog Lilly, and who, with her friend Cooper (what's with all this last name as first name stuff?!) is trying to set up their dog-walking "business". Madison works as a volunteer at a pet shelter run by a family friend, which is evidently falling on hard times. In place of a regular birthday party, which Madison really didn't want, she holds a fund-raiser for the shelter, but the collection box (and all the money in it) is stolen. I don't recall reading where that was ever resolved, which is odd. Maybe I missed it.
As the story progresses, we learn more and more more a local dog-fighting ring, where brutal men train-up brutal dogs to fight each other and the men wager a lot of money on outcomes. Madison gets more involved in investigating this than I felt comfortable with, but at least when she gets out of the scrape she was in, she has the smarts to put this into the hands of the law, where it belongs, so while I had a few uncomfortable moments reading this, her heart was in the right place, and she made some smart decisions, which is commendable.
Indeed, there were portions of this novel where Madison seemed a lot older than 11, but the issue isn't whether it's believable and realistic to me, so much as whether it's something an eleven-year-old can read, enjoy, and learn from, and I think I would have loved this novel at that age. Not only does it offer a fun and thrilling adventure with some unnervingly dangerous situations, it also educates about pet issues: dogs are not to be taken lightly, and are living, feeling beings who need love and care, so I'd give it five stars for that.
In short, I recommend this novel for appropriate age levels (chronological or developmental!)
