Shih Tzu: Your Happy Healthy Pet Book

Books about France, the French, and Francophiles are a bit of an Achilles heel for me; I like France so much that I'll read potentially so-so French-related books just because they feed my Francophile side. "Spotted in France" was one of those books for me. I didn't expect it to be that great, but I hoped that it would feed my love for All Things French long enough to let me get through a few non-French-related books.

The premise of the story--an expat American living in Paris who travels by Vespa with his dalmation, JP, to the South of France to be bred--is charming enough. And while I finished the book (which is more than I can say of "Extremely Pale Rose," another French-chic-lit tale written by an expat, and both whose premise and writing style were so indigestible and forced that I couldn't make it past the first several chapters), it really was only so-so.

The primary crime was that the author stretched what could have been a very entertaining 5,000-word essay into a much-too-long-for-its-subject-matter book. The book was short as-is, with the book's dimensions just small enough and its font and margins just big enough to make it kind-of pass for a book. It felt like the author or publisher was fudging with font size and margins in the same way high-schoolers do in order to meet a teacher's minimum page count. And consequently, much of the story limped along.

The other problem I had with the book was the author himself. He uses French sporadically and clunkily throughout the tale with no seemingly other purpose than to repeatedly show the reader that yes, he speaks French; that yes, he speaks French with the French; and that yes, even though the book is primarily written in English, he was speaking FRENCH with the French. In other words, he was trying too hard to prove that point repeatedly instead of focusing on the story itself, which, while contrived for much of the second half of the book, had its charming moments.

So while this wasn't my favorite French chic lit as of late (Sara Midda's "South of France Sketchbook" comes to mind), it fit its breezy description and kept me moderately entertained. And, really, there's not much to like about the idea of a Dalmation flying down French country roads wearing goggles and riding with his owner on a vintage Vespa.