(19)Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue

Wednesday, March 11, 2015


Maggie Brennan hasn't been living in San Francisco for very long.  She moved out west with her beloved dog, Toby.   Ninety-Eight days ago Toby died, leaving Maggie alone in a new city to deal with her crippling grief.  It has been ninety-eight days since Maggie has left her house.  Which causes a bit of a problem because Maggie is a pet bereavement counselor and her job is to help people get over the loss of their pets.   She has been keeping her "situation" a secret from her patients.  Until she meets Anya.   Anya lost her dog, Billy, several weeks ago and her brother, Henry, set up the appointment with Maggie hoping that Maggie would help Anya realize that Billy wasn't coming back.   The two grieving pet owners become friends as Maggie starts taking her agoraphobia more seriously.   Part of it is because Maggie wants to get better, but part of it is because of the handsome Henry.   Will the two women be able to find the missing Billy and will Maggie ever get over the loss of her beloved Toby?

I am definitely a dog person.  Even since our family got a cat, I still consider myself a dog person.  Losing a pet, any pet, can be a very traumatic experience and I can fully understand the need to seek out therapy to help deal with the loss.   I can even  understand where the death of a pet could be a "trigger" as it was with Maggie.  Maggie is obviously a caring person who wants to help others, but she was struggling to help herself.  She even was intimately aware of agoraphobia because her own mother hasn't left the house in over twenty years.   But, having said all of that, Dog Crazy didn't really have me "crazy".  I found it to be a bit predictable and one-dimensional.   We didn't get to really get into Maggie's head.  I felt like we just scraped the surface with her.  Not to mention Anya, she comes across as a peculiar little rich girl who was patronized by her older brothers and that kind of annoyed me.  I did enjoy all of the cute little critters depicted in the story and the focus the author put on animal rescues.  It is obviously a cause near and dear to her heart.

Bottom line - Dog Crazy is a bit of a fluffy kind of book that could appeal to dog lovers, but know that it is definitely fluff.

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