The Dog of the North

Penny has left her husband and quit her job. Her grandmother is living amid the squalor of a hoarder, her grandfather needs to escape from his hateful second wife, and her parents are missing, lost in the wilds of Australia. Penny must find a way to help all of these people, but especially herself.

It's the humor of the quirky characters—the strange lives they lead, the odd challenges they face—that I enjoyed with this book. But mid-book, as situations began to be resolved, the story got clunky, forced at times, and the humor grew thin, even non-existent, and that was disappointing to me; I'd had such high hopes for this book.