Book #62: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Title: The Art of Racing in the Rain
Author: Garth Stein

Watership Down gives me the willies. I resisted letting my fourth-grader get into the Hank the Cowdog series solely on the basis that Hank is, in fact, a dog. In short, I don't, on principle, like books with animal protagonists. But maybe we've been watching too much Martha Speaks lately (it's on right now, sick kids lying on the couch), because Enzo, the narrator of The Art of Racing in the Rain, is a dog I could actually like. He tells the story of life as he sees it, which is sometimes a life of running in the park and riding in a car with his head hanging out the window, but it's mostly a story about the humans he lives with: race-car driver Denny, his wife Eve, and eventually their daughter, Zoe. When Eve gets sick, the family's life starts to fall apart, and Enzo tells all in heartbreaking detail. My main beef with the book is that Eve's parents seem more like caricatures of villains than like real characters and Denny seems to have an awful lot of bad luck for one good man, but Enzo's dog-ness creates a distance that allows a reader to suspend disbelief more than if a human were telling the story.