A Dog's Purpose ~ W Bruce Cameron

A Dog's Purpose
Forge Books
July 6, 2010
320 Pages
Buy @ Amazon

A Dog's Purpose is told from a a dog's first person point of view. It's one dog, but one who lives many lifetimes--reincarnation, of sorts. We meet the dog living his first life as Toby a dog who starts out as a wild dog with his puppy siblings and his mother. He's captured and taken to either a woman's unlicensed rescue or the home of a woman who owns forty-ish dogs (I couldn't tell if she just owned a crap load of dogs or had a really unorganized rescue type thing).

Through the different lives, the dog decides that he's supposed to be finding his purpose. He uses things he's learned in each life to help him in each successive one. Little things like knowing how to open a gate becoming very useful to him as he cumulatively builds his skill set.

Because telling much (if anything) about the dogs later lives would spoil the earlier lives for anyone reading, this really isn't very detailed on purpose. It's a very endearing book, though. Each of the dogs lives are different, placing the dog in a different situation with different experiencs. A Dog's Purpose is very well written and it's very believeable that a dog is the one telling the story--not a person pretending to be a dog. Some of the observations from the dog (be they about the cats the dog encounters or in the different lives or about 'school') are very creative and truly very 'dog-like'.

As someone who loves dogs I found this book very touching and it brought up memories of my dogs. I don't know if someone who doesn't like dogs would enjoy the book as much, but I also don't know why the book would really appeal to them in the first place, so . . .

I definitely recommend this book if you ever wonder what your dog is thinking, if you love your dog, if you miss your dog, or if you even just love dogs but don't have one. Do know though that it did make me cry.

10/10



thank you to Goodreads First Reads for this book (so, so much)




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if you saw Colbert Report yesterday you know he's sick (and so am I) so be nice and sign up?