Rex and the City: A Memoir of a Woman, a Man, and a Dysfunctional Dog Book

Despite a love of animals, I've always been a little scornful of the "cat/dog that changed my life" books. Everyone's pet has a story, I thought, that doesn't mean I want to read it. Anyhow, this title was free for a wee while and I figured I would give it a go. It sounded entertaining enough, and the dog is really cute. And I shall say - it had me hooked - I'm not normally much of a non-fiction reader, but I could not put this book down. I really enjoyed reading about Wallace's exploits, about the sense of helplessness from having adopted this poor, broken dog and then the sense of fulfillment when he became the dog that he should have been from the start. Wallace is certainly a charmer! The writer has a self-deprecating sense of humour, and a skill at focusing on just the right things - and despite a bit of repetition (I believe these were originally magazine editorials, hence the constant reminders on the size of the apartment, etc), her writing style was very engaging.

I only have one complaint about his book, in fact, and that is the editting. It's shocking, considering that this is not a self-publised title, but was released in book format via Random House and has been formatted in ebook by professions. They got the formating right, I'll give them that - but throughout the book there are words missing, badly editted sentences and the occasional wrong word used. No spelling mistakes that I could pick, but some of the sentence structures are a bit deformed. This distracted me rather from the charming plot and made me read and re-read several sentences, frowning as I tried to fix it in my head. And with the author reminding us frequently that she's an English Major and takes creative writing classes - you would think that someone would have picked up on these minor but irritating errors before it went to eprint.

Anyhow, grammatic niggles aside, I really enjoyed this book and I think it ended on a good note. Whilst the additional extract from "Rex part 2" made for very interesting reading, I think I would rather their tale ended, for me, on a happy note. Not with the animal dying, which seems to be the finale for most of this genre, but with the dog really living.