Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Dog, Ray by Linda Coggin. The worst talking animal books are the ones where the animal thinks, acts, and speaks like a human instead of like an animal. This book did that on purpose, and it worked.

The story opened with a girl dying. No details, she was in a car with her father, a horse jumped a fence, there was a crash, and next thing she knew she was sitting in an office, facing a woman behind a desk.

The woman kept telling her she had to pick a job fast before they were all gone, but (of course) the girl was quite confused. In the next breath, the woman told her all the good jobs were gone, but there was one in a "litter", just walk through the right door. She repeatedly told her to go through the right door, not the left.

So, of course, the main character went through the left by mistake... (There were a number of coincidences that happened to advance the plot.)

Turns out the right door would have made her be reborn without her memories, but since she went through the left, she remembered her whole life as a human. You'd think they'd put a lock on the left door or a chain or at least put a chair in front of it...

So the girl was reborn as a puppy, and lived her life as a dog while remembering her life as a human girl. It was really believable and an interesting story.

Though I suspect the author didn't intend it, and young readers would never pick up on it, the ending of the book was pretty horrific. As the dog grew up, her human memories faded, so it was like the human girl was slowly dying before our eyes. On the surface it was a happy ending though: The dog ended up in a wonderful loving family.

DNF

57: American Hippo by Sarah Gailey. I'm so sad I had to DNF this book, nearly everything about it was wonderful.

In real life, outside of the story, the American government once had looked into importing herds of hippos to use for meat. When Gailey learned about that fact, she used it to write this alternate history of America, where hippos basically replace horses.

Set in the "old west" (except in the swampy southern states), the story follows a "cowboy" (riding a hippo) as he recruits others to help move herds of feral hippos from one state to another.

The worldbuilding was so interesting! The characters were great. The story was so good! Only one thing forced me to DNF it: Too many characters had they/their as their pronouns. I was endlessly stumbling as I read, trying to figure out who the subject was or if it was one person or multiple people. I couldn't get lost in the story at all, because I kept having to stop reading and backtrack to try to figure things out.

I thought a lot about the pronoun issue even after I stopped reading. I think it might be an issue with the writing? If you have multiple 'he' or 'she' pronouns in a scene, the author would usually use other words besides he/she ("the older man", "the homeowner", whatever)? Or maybe that 'their' can mean plural just added an extra layer of confusion.

"Mike and Judy finished talking, then they walked off to look at the hippo."

If both characters use they/their, is that sentence talking about one of them? If so, which one? Or is it both of them?

I thought maybe I'd get used to it if I kept reading it, but eventually my stumbling and needing to backtrack became too frustrating to go on.

Please note that I have ZERO issues with trans people or gender fluid-ness or anything like that! I know pronouns are a touchy subject and I'm a little worried about this review.