Review: A Dog's Perfect Christmas
A Dog’s Perfect Christmas, a novella of sorts by A
Dog’s Purpose collection best-selling creator, W Bruce Cameron does not disappoint. This narrative departs
from Cameron’s usual delivery from a dog’s point of view relying instead on a delightful
collection of third person points of view, including
the dogs’. This equates to a novel rich with emotional connection and bristling
with exuberance, warmth, humor, tenderness and abject dread, rather like a dog visiting
the vet’s. The swings from fraught school yard cliques to boardroom ballsups to
doggie destruction are smooth and bright leaving us fully invested with the
whole the family.
Kind-hearted, Hunter Goss is a man
whose offbeat bumbling nature and incurable ability to misplace essential items
like his coffee cup belies his executive talents and business acumen. He works
long hours, which conveniently blankets him from the chaos of home life. The
need to impress his new boss marinates him in stress that is both tragically
palpable and amusing as he tries to hide everything from his family.
His exotic, ex-litigator wife,
Juliana is a list maker and master of the home-life vessel but she is capsizing
under the continual waves of lawlessness her family heap upon her. She loves
her twin three-year-old sons despite their mad half hourly sabotage attempts.
She can’t help but love her recently teenaged daughter despite her savage
hormone-driven outbursts and she’d even tolerate her husband’s apathetic
widowed father, Sander a little better if only Hunter were around more. It’s
the classic crumbling of the family fortress thanks to the pressures on the
family within. She gives Hunter a subtle ultimatum and then promptly takes ill
just weeks before Christmas. Hunter fears the worst for his marriage, his job
and the life of the women he loves. The entire Goss family stronghold is in
danger of collapse.
What sounds like a cheese platter of
clichéd melodrama is anything but thanks to the ineffable narrative and
character portrayal of not just the main players, but every single person who
colours this story including the dreary boffins at work, Hunter’s insufferable
receptionist, Kim, Ello’s crush, Sean O’Brien (also Hunter’s boss’s son) and Ruby,
the adorable abandoned puppy who bounds like a bouncing jack into their lives.
Family life is messy and complex,
demanding and choked with moments almost invisible to the naked and overtired
eye. A Dog’s Perfect Christmas encapsulates all this with zeal and
affection and incredible accuracy. Cameron nails the horror of teenage anger
and angst so flawlessly I swore he had consulted with my own she-devil teen.
Ello’s eighth-grade agonising exchanges with her parents and herself are
hilariously en point. It’s her growing relationship with her grandpa and the
situation of enforced responsibility they both find themselves in that
gradually mellows the beast within and tugs at the heart strings. Add a
generous dash of first-love awkward, a bevy of salacious intent (aimed at
Sander) , the contemplative ruminations of Winstead the hound and the Shirley
Valentine-esque laments of a thoroughbred mare hitched to a milk cart and
you’ve got a novel that appeals equally in huge beautiful dollops to mid-grade
teens, mums, dads, grandparents and … dog (lovers)! This is clearly an ‘everyone’
book but I especially recommend it for middle grade readers and above.
Cameron has always done ‘dog’ good. A Dog’s Perfect Christmas is ode to the ways guileless families and
their ever-devoted dogs cope with every day and not so every day crises. In a story
that is funny, sad, scary and joyous, the cream of feel-(real)-good floats
above all else. This must become a movie one day; I need to experience it again
and again …
Title:
A Dog’s Perfect Christmas
Author: W Bruce Cameron
Publisher: Pan Macmillan, $19.99
Publication Date: November 2020
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781529010114
For ages: 12+
Type: Middle Grade Fiction / Adult Contemporary
Buy the
Book: Pan Macmillan, Boomerang Books,
Booktopia
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