Book #49 of 2024: Waggit's Tale | Book #50 of 2024: Reflection | DNF: Tiger House

[thistlechaser]

Waggit's Tale by Peter Howe.

Quick synopsis: A city dog is abandoned, finds a new dog-family, then finds a new owner.

Brief opinion: This book was a rollercoaster, but not in a good way. At first I thought it would be a great talking animal book, but I quickly grew to not like it so much. Plus the message it sends in the end is the most confusing part of all.

Plot: A puppy is adopted by a family. Days later the wife gives birth to a baby. The puppy shows curiosity about the baby, so the father abandons the puppy in the park. (Let's ignore all the logic holes of this whole part.)

In the park, the nameless puppy is found by a pack of dogs (in the book it's called a "team" of dogs, which makes sense for city dogs). He gets a name (Waggit, stupidest name ever, because he wags it (his tail) a lot). The dogs teach him how to survive in the "wild" of the park.

There's a war with another team, lots of fight and hunting for food, and more horrible naming. (A loner dog joins the team, so they name her... Alona. A loner. A lona. Ugh.)

All in all, most of these team dogs were abandoned by their humans, and most are really abused/have a hard time as wild dogs, so rightly so they hate humans.

In the end, Waggit gets caught and taken to the pound. A woman adopts him, and nearly instantly Waggit settles down and gets used to being owned again. He makes one trip back to the park to let his team know he's alive and okay, then he settles back into a life of "slavery" because at least that way he gets a warm place to sleep and three meals a day.

Writing/editing: Technical-wise it was fine, but very soon into the story, the dogs seemed really not very dog-like. Their language use was also odd (territory was called a "realm" for example, and all female dogs were "Lady [name]"). I liked "team" instead of "pack", but since the dogs didn't "speak human", how did they pick up "team" to use?

For some odd reason, accents seemed to come and go. The dog characters would sometimes talk very "street" ("I ain't got no time for dis!") and a couple paragraphs later they talked in a normal way.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: The only character I liked was Tazar, the leader of the wild dog team. He was the only character that was more than one-note.

I really, really, really do not understand the message this book was trying to send. Waggit and his pack were in full agreement that being enslaved to humans was the worst possible state for dogs. Life was hard, but the park dogs never starved. But in the blink of an eye, Waggit was fine going back to being under a human's control again. I wish the author would have explained it more (in the story's world, is it the natural state for dogs to want to be owned?). The seeming message (it's okay to not be free as long as you get food and shelter) is uncomfortable to me. (In real life, of course dogs should all have good homes as opposed to living on the street in packs, but the dogs in this book could talk, store food for winter, build simple shelters, plan battles, used newspapers as blankets... they weren't real dogs).

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️ ½ - 2.5 stars. I didn't like the book, but I didn't hate it either.


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Reflection: A Twisted Tale by Elizabeth Lim.

Quick synopsis: Twisted Tales is a series (currently 15 books, but a few more come out each year) that takes a star of one of the Disney movies and puts them into a darker situation. The books seem sort of like official fanfic.

In this one, Mulan battles her way through "Hell" (Diyu, the Chinese name for it).

Brief opinion: Mulan is one of my favorite movies and of course I like fanfic, so this should have worked for me, but it really didn't. It felt like it took forever to read, and for a book where the main character is fighting her way through hell, somehow it still felt like nothing happened.

Plot: The book starts late in the original movie. Captain Shang (instead of Mulan) is mortally wounded by Shan Yu in the big final battle with the Huns. Mulan is visited by the ghost of Shang's father, and she offers to go to the underworld/Diyu/Hell to save his son's soul so he will live.

Once she reaches hell and finds Shang's soul, the two plus a sometimes-stone lion (the Shang family guardian, like Mushu is to Mulan's family) have to try to fight their way out through 100 levels of hell.

There were so many battles and one trickster to deal with. Mazes, trials, all the different things Hell could throw at someone.

Writing/editing: Technical-wise, both were very good. If you want to learn more about what Chinese folks consider Hell to be, this is a great book to read.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: The book was almost completely action. In 400+ pages, there was little to no change for the characters (which makes sense, since this story takes place within the movie). As much as I like Mulan, this book felt pointless.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️ - 2 stars / disliked.

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DNF #42: Tiger House by Wendy Scott. Basically "Hunger Games" but with aliens. Some alien culture (which was oddly Japanese), selects people from other worlds/universes to fight for them. The main character, Jairus, was selected by mistake. He's a farmer, no fighter. I didn't find it interesting at all (nothing but action/fighting), so DNFed it about a quarter in.

Comments

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

I kind of liked the ending, actually. I thought it was refreshing to have a book where a domesticated animal realized he appreciated the comforts of home, and didn't necessarily want to live free which was also full of rough times facing the hunger, cold, etc. Maybe he bought into the park dogs' ideals of freedom while he was with them, but once back with a human he found he liked that life as well, for different reasons. I agree with you on the accents and human-like "voices" and sometimes actions of the dogs, though! You might like the second book better, though the woman who can talk to dogs is even more unbelievable than how they built shelters and stuff. I just rolled with it.