REVIEWED by Donna
TITLE: The Dog Trainer
AUTHOR: Owen Keehnan
PUBLISHER: Wilde City Press
LENGTH: 23,000 Words
BLURB: Sometimes the last thing you expect is exactly what you need.
Richard is a typical neurotic gay urbanite, a serial monogamist with a domineering peer group and a well-paying dead end job. That is until one night, while stumbling home drunk, Richard finds a puppy named Hambone. Almost immediately Richard’s life and his relationships begin to change. At the recommendation of Evelyn, his neighbor across the hall, Richard hires a dog trainer named Abe. From the moment Richard hears Abe’s voice on the phone he feels a connection with this professional pooch-handler. When they meet face-to-face the attraction is palpable. Richard loves the way Abe treats Hambone. Abe opens Richard’s eyes to a different take on life and what really matters.
Will love conquer all in the end? It will if Hambone has any say in the matter.
REVIEW: Like most of his breakups, this one had been a bigger blow to Richard’s ego than to his heart. That’s not to say it was a minor blow. Richard’s ego was formidable and certainly much larger than his normal-sized heart. Relationships had always been a sort of perfect stage for attention and diversion. Relationships allowed him to see his life as something other than what it was. Romance gave his life plot rather than simply a routine. Romance was an avenue for episodic drama.
That’s right, Richard is a twat. His friends easily influence him, he’s overly concerned with appearances, he just presents as weak in general. I was fully prepared to hate the guy, to feel distaste at his self-absorption but instead I felt sympathy because it’s apparent from the start that Richard really isn’t happy in the life he’s living. He just doesn’t see that until he starts to make a few changes and all of a sudden he finds himself beginning to enjoy little things in his life. The catalyst for these changes? He finds an abandoned puppy that he decides to name Hambone.
On the surface I’d say the idea that adopting a dog could change your life to the extent it does in this story is a tad farfetched but the way it’s done here, well I bought it. Hambone loves Richard, depends on Richard, trusts Richard to look after him and that’s something that he has never experienced before. He pushes himself to stand up to people to protect Hambone. He meets new people due to owning Hambone, people who open his eyes, both intentionally and unintentionally, to just how shallow and fake his life has been.
One of those people he meets is Abe, the dog trainer, who obviously enters Richard’s life with the purpose of training his puppy. Abe is perhaps too nice a character but it’s what is needed to balance out all of Richard’s problems. The focus of this story is not the romance between Abe and Richard but the way Richard evolves into the person he’s meant to be, and luckily that’s a person Abe wants to be with. Abe and Richard don’t even meet until around halfway through the story.
I’ve seen a couple of other reviews where the reviewer had issues with the author’s writing style. To be honest, it threw me at first too. For the first few pages I actually had to make an effort to immerse myself in this story, if that makes sense. I was a bit worried that the book was going to be an awkward read for me but once I got going it didn’t bother me at all.
What did confuse me a time or two was the slide into a point of view other than Richard’s. The story is told almost exclusively from his point of view but a few times, from one sentence to the next, we’d suddenly switch to a different character and then switch back. It didn’t happen often enough to really matter but it did make me pause so I could make sense of whose thoughts I was hearing.
Overall I really enjoyed this story. Though I mentioned I had to adjust to the writing style, once I did I actually enjoyed the way it was written. What first struck me as distancing ended up feeling novel. If you’re not an animal lover you may not buy into this story. I’m not saying you need to love your dog to enjoy this book but it likely will ease your way to connecting with Richard. Yes, I recommend this but at the same time I’ll caution to be prepared for something a bit different.
RATING: 
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