Chasing the Blue Sky

This book is... wow, it's an experience. I love books which make me feel things and get me invested in the characters, and Chasing the Blue Sky absolutely delivers in that regard. Everything from happiness to sorrow, anger to hopefulness, melancholy to wonderment: I felt all of them. Because of this, I had to put the book down several times to just get a break, but I never once wanted to outright quit reading because I just had to see Toby's journey through to the end.

Toby is a young pitbull mix, the puppy who was closest to his mother (whose life we see in the first chapters). He goes from a miserable environment with a doting mother and negligent, abusive humans to a loving home which soon enough turns just as negligent when the shine of a new puppy wears off. Ultimately, the parents make horribly cruel life choices which shatter Toby's life and the hearts of both children who were attached to him. Thus, he lands in the care of the local animal shelter where we meet most of the dog characters and the only human characters (except perhaps the boy child) who are actually worth knowing.

I don't want to spoil the fates of any of the dogs, thus I won't say who among the cast of dogs is lost, but I will say that it's vital to go into this book understanding that it features a "kill shelter" and pulls no punches in showing how innocent canine lives - and the lives of shelter workers who try to protect them - are impacted by human negligence, abuse, and shelter overcrowding. Don't go into it expecting a feel-good puppy story. But do go into it if you can handle the emotional journey - and be prepared to feel heartache and fury in almost equal measure.

The epilogue sums up wonderfully why the story in Chasing the Blue Sky is important, so I'll share:

Behind every lonely bark that resonates down the long, cold halls is a story. Behind the clatter of every stainless steel bowl on the barren floor is a vibrant, rich life, longing to be lived. Behind every frightened whimper from the shadowy corner of a concrete alcove is a story of redemption, waiting to be written. This book tells the story of one such life, but across our country, there are countless dogs like Toby, Jack, Marilynn, Oscar, Julius, Dizzy, and the others in these pages.

I can't say I enjoyed the story emotionally, but I can say I'm glad I read it and I liked the glimpse it offered of the plight shelter pets face. At times, I honestly felt disgust over being human just by association with real humans who are as horrible as some of the characters in this book. So... I like it, I just felt a lot of unpleasant emotions - especially as a result of being a highly empathic animal lover with a long history of rescuing strays and adopting furry friends.

For the story alone, I'd easily rate the book five stars. However, I had a few gripes with the way dogs are portrayed within and that knocks it down to four stars in my eyes.

I fully believe dogs are intelligent beings who understand and feel emotions. I also fully believe that their communication with one another is the best equivalent they can manage to the ways we know - albeit with scents, sounds, and body language instead of human language. I also completely understand using human language in a story to portray what dogs are telling one another. However, at times the dogs were excessively humanized to the point it detracted from the story... especially when it seemed to contradict their usual characteristics.

For example: the dogs are acknowledged as, logically, not being able to read signs or understand English. However, sometimes, the dogs do seem to understand and far too much emphasis is put on the nametags of the humans at the shelter to portray their names. (It would have felt more genuine to use the humans introducing themselves or to call them things such as Dreadlocks Man and Kind Smile Woman etc - how a dog might think of them before realizing the sound of their names were in fact names.) There also seems to be a shift midway from calling a dog's human family their people to using the term 'owner's when there's no reason Toby should know what an owner is and should be still thinking of them as just people.

At another point, during a horrifically depressing scene wherein one of the dogs is euthanized, the dog's foreleg is referred to as an arm; it takes away from the scene in an unpleasant way by bringing to mind an anime human-animal hybrid. And sometimes it's not made clear enough that the English used to portray dogs' communication is meant to be a human-readable approximation of what is really said between them in dog noises. For example, Toby is described as 'speaking' each word he says slowly, but there's no logical equivalent in dog noises thus it feels as if he's portrayed actually speaking English.

This story is too poignant and important for the cartoonish mental imagery those mix-ups bring to mind, and for that I feel they weaken an otherwise painfully amazing book. The author is far too skilled at causing empathetic reactions within the majority of the book to have to fall back on overly anthropomorphizing the canine characters.

Those characters will, however, stick in my mind for a long time - especially Oscar and Toby.

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book through BookSirens. My review is left voluntarily, is not incentivized, and contains my honest opinion.)