Category Fiction

Dog school confidential

Nancy Crowe

51+12AmLdKL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_When 24-year-old Evie answers an online ad to become a dog trainer, she doesn’t know exactly why. She’s never had a pet and has little experience with dogs. But before she even clicks on the ad, “suddenly I felt that I stood in the doorway of a crowded, noisy room, picking up the sound of a whisper no one else seemed to hear.”

That is key to The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances by Ellen Cooney (Mariner Books, 2014) — learning how to listen in a new way.

The training program is at a mountaintop sanctuary for stray and rescued dogs, and Evie is the lone trainee. There are no classes. There are no instructors. There are only stern innkeeper Mrs. Auberchon, Giant George (a young man with no apparent history or actual age), the older women who run the sanctuary, and a handful of dogs who — accompanied by mysteriously placed case history notes — introduce themselves to Evie, one by one.

Hank is a Lab/pit bull mix left anonymously at a shelter, deemed unadoptable due to aggression. Josie, a small white dog, lived in the lap of luxury until the new baby came along. Her hearing loss was determined to be the result of a recent blow, or several. Tasha is pure Rottweiler; before arriving at the Sanctuary, she was pushed out of a car at a stop sign, adopted twice and returned both times, and barely escaped being adopted by dogfighters.

The dogs, of course, aren’t the only ones with troubled pasts. Evie knows she requires just as much training and re-socializing as her canine charges. Mrs. Auberchon is a lone wolf and determined to remain so. What they have in common is an uncanny knack for communicating with the dogs. Evie “messages” them. Mrs. Auberchon reads to them.

Some aspects of the novel were puzzling. It’s hard to believe such an unstructured dog training program could exist for very long. The sanctuary staffers barely communicate with Evie and show little warmth or welcome. The canine characters, however, were very genuine, as dogs tend to be.

This story is a reminder that there are no bad dogs, as Barbara Woodhouse famously said in her 1982 book. There are dogs with severe limitations, and sadly, we humans are sometimes ill equipped to respond. My rescue dog, a German shepherd-golden retriever-collie mix, joined the household at about two years old, which in dog years is plenty of time to develop life-altering fears and bad habits. Like pulling at the leash and lunging at other dogs, sometimes injuring the human holding the leash who is trying to restrain her or, at the very least, hold on. Or launching herself toward moving bicycles because they frighten her so badly that attacking them seems to be her only option. After three training classes, there is improvement, but unfortunately not enough for walking her to be safe. However, she has a home, and who knows what learning opportunities may unfold?

Finding peace with doing what we can do for abandoned and abused animals, even when that seems woefully inadequate, is humbling. It reminds us to not give up on ourselves. After studying dog breeds and dog training and reading countless case histories, she writes a case note for herself in the form of a haiku:

Came in as a stray.
Is not completely hopeless.
Please allow to stay.

Elephants, moms, and memories

Nancy Crowe

UnknownAfter starting Jodi Picoult’s novel, “Leaving Time,” I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it. A reference to an elephant named Mary being tried and hanged for murder in 1916 in Tennessee led me to look it up to see if this really happened. Sadly, it did, and it haunted me.

I was drawn in by the story, though, and couldn’t resist a tale that included a stumbling, self-doubting psychic. So I forged ahead.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna is a solitary soul who reminded me a little of Tatum O’Neal’s character in the movie, “Paper Moon.” Jenna’s mother, Alice, was an elephant researcher with a particular passion for studying how elephants grieve. Her brilliant, mentally ill father, Thomas, ran the New England elephant sanctuary where they lived and worked.

The novel hinges on what happened, or may have happened, on a night when Jenna was  three and Alice disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As a young teen, she’s busy working the missing-persons sites on the Internet and poring over her mother’s old journals, longing for the mother she both remembers and never knew. On the fringes of her life are her grandmother, with whom she lives, and her father, who now calls a psychiatric hospital home. Jenna finally hires jaded private investigator Virgil, who worked on her mother’s case when he was a police officer; and disgraced former celebrity psychic Serenity.

A precocious child, a boozy ex-cop, and a psychic with a past. Cue the cute music, right? The three form an uneasy, unlikely alliance as they try to piece together what happened that night, what led up to it, and who might know. Another sanctuary worker, Nevvie, died — accidentally trampled by an elephant, so the police report said — the night Alice disappeared. Was Alice responsible for Nevvie’s death, or did Alice herself die at the hands of her increasingly unstable husband?

The hardest question is the one Jenna has to face: If her mother is alive, why did she leave Jenna behind? As Virgil and Serenity draw closer to the answer, they increasingly want to protect her from it. Until Jenna takes the case back into her own hands and hops a bus for Tennessee.

And that’s just the humans. The elephants themselves, one named Maura in particular, have their own bonds and losses. Elephants are exemplary mothers; mother and baby elephants are part of a complex social structure. When Maura’s calf dies, Alice — both as a scientist studying elephant grief and as a steward and friend of the elephants — stays with her as they all process what has happened.

Grief is an experience of all creatures great and small. I had two peppered corydoras catfish in my aquarium, and when one died, the other stayed by his body for several hours.

Back to the book. The story resolved in a way I probably should have picked up on earlier — but I’m kind of glad I didn’t. You may find yourself, as I did, going back and reading earlier scenes.

Cat got your tongue?

Nancy Crowe

The first thing I noticed about “Love Saves the Day” was, of course, the rather cheesy title. My eye would not have lingered further if not for 1) the tiger cat on the cover and 2) the name of the author, Gwen Cooper, who wrote the bestselling memoir “Homer’s Odyssey.” Sold.

In “Homer’s Odyssey,” Cooper told the captivating and remarkable story of Homer, a blind black cat who would change her life — and even save it on one terrifying occasion. He also helped her find her voice as a writer.

One of the voices in “Love Saves the Day,” a novel, is that of Prudence, a tiger cat with some very definite opinions about the Way Things Ought to Be. She has lived with her human, Sarah, in a little apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and has had everything pretty much the way she wants it since Sarah found her at a construction site when she was a kitten. Prudence is a one-person cat; any other human is peripheral at best. She reminded me very much of Idgie, my diva tiger kitty who passed a couple of years ago.

Some readers may have a problem with animals as narrators. I do not. If I did, this is written well enough that I could probably still “listen” to what this feline narrator has to say about the way we humans treat cats, not to mention one another.

One day, Sarah does not come home, and soon Sarah’s daughter Laura and son-in-law Josh come in with boxes. They begin packing up and clearing out what Prudence sees as her life with Sarah, finally carrying out Prudence herself and taking her to “Upper West Side, which is obviously all the way on the opposite side of the world,” Prudence reflects.

She keeps waiting for Sarah to come back from wherever she is and take her home. In the meantime, she has two new humans, a strange apartment, and even new food (organic instead of the grocery store stuff and “people food” Sarah gave her) to manage. Prudence discovers that some people are woefully unschooled in cat protocol — and have their own issues as well.

The story is told alternately by Prudence, Laura, and Sarah. Beneath the present conflicts lie old wounds suffered (and inflicted) by mother and daughter, which stem from a years-ago trauma when they literally lost everything in a day.

It’s a good read if you love animals, especially cats, who have their own set of rules and appreciate being kept respectfully informed just as much as anyone else does.

* * *

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

For a book called “Love Saves the Day,” this was a pretty rough read. When Laura was fourteen, she and Sarah and all their neighbors were evacuated from their Lower East Side apartment building on a Saturday morning, presumably because some bricks fell off the back of the aging building. First they’re told they can go back in as soon as the building is declared safe. As the day wears on, they are told the building is being condemned and no one can go back in at all. Laura and Sarah’s neighbor, Mr. Mandelbaum, begs to be allowed to retrieve his cat, Honey, but he is barred from doing so. Desperate, Laura sneaks in and tries to get Honey herself, but the effort fails and Sarah is frightened and furious. The building is torn down that night before anyone has a chance to file a petition, grant a stay, or otherwise intervene. The residents lose what little they have in the course of a single day. For Laura, trust and security crumble. (I was horrified to read in the afterword that a century-old tenement building was evacuated and demolished by the City of New York in 1998. Two cats, one named Honey, and a parrot were inside, and their owners were not allowed to retrieve them.)

That agonizing scene comes on the heels of Prudence’s present-day realization that Sarah has died. Grief-stricken and frightened by a quarrel Laura and Josh have just had, she starts nibbling on some lilies Josh brought in for their anniversary. Lilies are toxic, and very often fatal, to cats. As Prudence loses consciousness, it appears she might be joining her beloved human on the other side. Later, she hears Sarah singing to her . . . then wakes up in the vet clinic to discover it is Laura singing to her, asking her to stay.

As it turns out, the abandoned construction site where Sarah found Prudence was where their apartment building once stood, where their lives and hopes had come crashing down years before in a senseless power struggle that had nothing to do with them. “I know now what Laura knew already that day when she risked her life for Honey’s — that love is love, whether it goes on two legs or four,” Sarah says. “I was meant to find Prudence that day. … I’ve always known I was keeping her for Laura.”