Love Like a Dog
Anne Calcagno
North Street Book Prize 2023 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Literary Fiction
Critique by Jendi Reiter
A pit bull with a lot of heart transforms a lonely boy's life in Anne Calcagno's gripping and well-researched novel Love Like a Dog. Pits are a maligned and misunderstood breed because unscrupulous owners use them for illegal dog fights. This story shows their loyal and hardworking side. "Punish the deed, not the breed," say the dog rescuers whom Calcagno consulted for her novel.
When the book opens, the narrator, Dirk, is a first-grader living with his brusque and depressed father, Russ, a supermarket manager in Chicago. Dirk's mother walked out on them when he was three, and as the book goes on, one can understand why she found her husband too harsh to live with. One day, Russ finds a pit bull puppy in the store dumpster and brings him home. The alienated father and son begin to bond over training Bull's Eye for weight-pulling competitions.
The dog's determination makes him a role model for Dirk, too, who discovers reserves of self-discipline and courage within himself when he finds a project that really engages him. I've seen this happen in real life with my tween son at sled-dog camp. Love Like a Dog illustrates how hands-on challenges and teamwork with animals can foster self-esteem and maturity in youths who struggle to care about abstract schoolwork.
The story follows Dirk as he grows into a teenager alongside Bull's Eye and the other pit bulls that his family adopts. While the young man is on an upward trajectory, Russ is headed the other way, breeding dogs without regard for their health and getting them involved in fights to the death. With help from Nellie, Russ's dog-breeder ex-girlfriend, Dirk and his friends execute a daring rescue from a dog-fighting arena. I liked how Nellie stayed in Dirk's life as a surrogate parent after she called it quits with his dad.
Stylistically, there were some mixed metaphors and a fair amount of sentence fragments. The book had a professional layout with a dynamic and legible cover design in shades of white, black, red, and gold. It's pretty hard to resist that friendly dog face on the cover—great bookshelf appeal. However, there were some typos throughout.
Love Like a Dog has the emotional complexity and plot twists to engage adult readers, while also being appropriate for older teens. The wealth of information I learned about pit bulls never felt like an info dump because all the details revealed something about the characters' personalities and relationships. I couldn't put this one down!
