Canine tails — and teeth

I didn’t intend to read You Had Me at Woof (2010) by Julie Klam so soon on the heels of Dog Days: A Year with Olive & Mabel, but a hold at the library came in sooner than expected, so I needed to get on with it before it expired. Klam is a dog lover through and through, but I didn’t quite connect with her story as much as I hoped I would. Perhaps because she lives on the Upper West Side of New York City, perhaps because her dog breed of choice is the Boston Terrier, one of those bulgy-eyed, snub-nosed dogs (see the book cover) that aren’t my favorite canine type, and perhaps because her doggy relationships seemed quite a bit more chaotic and involved way more biting than I would personally tolerate.

Still, her stories of working with a rescue group for Boston Terriers was quite moving and she had some insightful things to say about letting the search for a perfect “furever” home gets in the way of finding a good fit between animal and human. Klam writes with a great deal of humor but can also deliver a straight line when the situation requires. Overall, a good book that fell short of the “drowning into a puddle of cuteness while reading” standard that I hold for all books about dogs.