Book Review: The Dogcatcher and the Fox

The Dogcatcher and the Fox. J. D. Porter. Self-Published, June 30, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 268 pages.

Reviewed by Florence Osmund.

It’s 1919 Chicago, and Raven Griffith works at the Animal Welfare Association. Young, gutsy, and determined, Raven faces numerous obstacles in her work, often putting her health and safety at risk as she tries to fulfill her life goal of protecting animals from people who abuse them. And matters are complicated with her being in a field dominated by men.

Raven’s animal escapades begin with her rescuing two horses during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, and that is when she meets Rondell, a Black man she befriends and relies on throughout the story. Certain other people play a significant role in Raven's life as she pursues justice for animals, including Min Lee, who teaches her how to train dogs as well as a few old-but-true Chinese proverbs; Raven's boss, Lou Hanson, who has a rough exterior but a soft heart; Jo Washington, who has a deep-seated secret of her own; and Katherine Ruebottom, who believes in Raven and gives her a place to live.

The bulk of Raven's rescue and sleuth work involves dogs that go missing from various parts of the City. In her attempt to discover who is stealing the dogs and for what purpose, she runs up against an array of gangsters, including Johnny Torrio (a mob boss known as The Fox), who is more than just a little annoyed with Raven’s interference with his business. Fortunately, the gangsters have rivals who want to help Raven, including a young Al Capone.

At times, it’s difficult for Raven to tell which of the Chicago police are mixed up with the gangsters’ illicit activities, and when Raven meets Officer Walt Miller, it takes her a while to determine which side he’s really on. The story wouldn’t be complete without Raven becoming attached to some of the dogs she rescues and falling in love with one of Chicago’s finest. 

I found this book to be engaging, entertaining, and enlightening. It includes a nice balance between Raven’s story and facts about early twentieth-century Chicago history and landmarks. The plot was well-structured, creative, and appropriately paced. The characters were deftly created and believable. 

Book Review: The Stories We Choose Not To Tell

The Stories We Choose Not To Tell. Kelly Fumiko Weiss. Windy City Publishers, May 12, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 244 pages.

Reviewed by Kandice Cole.

The Stories We Choose Not To Tell, by Kelly Fumiko Weiss, is a novel that follows Angela, a bi-racial TV news producer, who attempts to make sense of her family’s complicated history after the death of her grandmother, Aiko, who was a Japanese incarceration camp survivor. As Angela grieves the loss of her grandmother, she also learns she is pregnant. This unexpected news, along with a box of family heirlooms given to her by her Auntie Pamela, motivates her to explore her Japanese identity more deeply.

While Angela had a pleasant upbringing with her Japanese mother, Judith, and her American father, Edward, she still feels incomplete. Reclaiming her Japanese identity becomes a priority given the guilt that she starts to feel about the child she will be having with her husband, Carl. In an honest passage, Angela tells Carl, “I feel like it’s my fault that we aren’t Japanese anymore. Most people can’t even tell I’m Japanese when they look at me. I’m it. The straw that broke the camel’s back.” This internal tension that Angela wants to resolve becomes the impetus for her to fervently learn about her family’s history and understand the stories of her grandmother and mother.

As Angela takes this journey, she learns that not everyone welcomes this unpacking of family history, which inevitably includes many painful stories. One of these people turns out to be her husband, who develops intense emotions about Angela's obsession with her quest since it often leaves him feeling neglected. Angela stays the course, eventually coming to terms with her identity and how it intersects with the stories of those who came before her.

This is a beautifully crafted book that centers around a time in American history that is often forgotten. It shows how historical events, such as the Japanese incarceration camps, had far-reaching effects on individuals and their families who had to endure these painful, oppressive experiences. The author explores how family history informs how people choose to live their lives in the present. Throughout the book, one can see how Angela, her mother, and aunt grapple with the discomfort of the past and the resulting strained relationships in the present.

The brief chapters make this book easy to read and connect you to the characters as they navigate their moment-to-moment internal dialogue. As you leave the mind of one character and shift to the next, one can’t help but see the interconnectedness between this cast of characters as they move through grief, family drama, pain, and joy.

I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of The Stories We Choose Not To Tell. Kelly Fumiko Weiss situates history within a modern landscape and explores themes that are especially relevant as American society grapples with its complicated past and moves towards a more inclusive future.

Book Review: Milo

Milo (01001101 01101001 01101100 01101111). Alexander Pyles. Radix Media, Chapbook, October 2019, 18 pages.

Reviewed by Mike Freveletti.

Alexander Pyles has given us a story that hits a lot of familiar notes usually associated with science fiction. I submit to you that this is not a bad thing. Milo is a story about what it means to endure, and if you had options to make your life better, would you explore them?

The main character, Milo, has a nerve disease that slowly deteriorates his body from the inside out and confines him to a wheelchair. He understands his situation. He realizes he didn’t do anything to deserve this disability and that there's nothing he can do.

Well, maybe there is something.

Milo’s best friend, Darius, shows him an article about a new robotics breakthrough, and readers are off to the races on an artificial intelligence (AI) romp that hits the notes we’ve come to expect from robot stories. It’s a robot story you’ve encountered before, but what keeps you reading is the layered human emotion that weaves in what the future of AI might look like. Well, not only what it might look like, but also what might be one of its biggest hurdles.

The technology is boilerplate and is described as a new synthetic body in which they swap out the brain and place it into a shiny new AI shell. It sounds reasonable, and I imagine even more enticing to someone who feels like they don’t have any other options, such as Milo. I quickly found myself imagining if I had a disease that made the things I take for granted simply disappear. What if I couldn't go to the bathroom without someone leading me? What if I couldn’t get up and kiss my wife due to the loss of my legs? What if I couldn’t talk? Or eat without help? I think it’s safe to say I would try just about anything to erase those problems.

Another interesting component of this story is that you assume the robotic alternative is flawless. If you’re going to replace your human body with something better, you expect no issues, right? That’s where another layer gets added to Milo. While his new body is head and shoulders above what he was working with as a human, it is a more basic version and not yet perfected. Think for a second about your smartphone and the upgrades you are prompted continuously to make even with how impressively powerful that little thing is in the palm of your hand. Imagine if you were required to follow the same update process to keep your body running at tip-top shape. Milo is beset by what I would call technological Tourette syndrome, a side effect of his new existence. His thoughts are constantly interrupted by flashes of binary code, hence the code you see in the book title.

The flaws of his new body creep into the prose as he bursts into fits of binary episodes while trying to process emotions or think critically. The insertion of binary code right onto the page feels like the way a surplus of footnotes within a text fractures a story and forces the reader to break up the rhythm of their reading. The binary code disrupts the narrative, just like it disrupts Milo. I won’t give away what happens, but, as you can imagine, the new body has its own set of challenges.

Science is not perfect, and while it aims to be empirical, it takes a lot of testing to get to that point. In Milo, we see our main character painted into a corner and given a choice. We see science and technology offering him a way out, but what we come to realize is that even if we get to the point where transference to robotic bodies is a realistic alternative, we’re still going to have a quality-control period. The consequences? The trade-offs? Those are the interesting parts, at least from a fictional perspective and something the author explores in a logical way.

Milo is a work of science fiction that reasonably considers the advancement of technology and poses the question: can you be both human and robot? The answer in Milo’s world is maybe you can and maybe you can’t.

Book Review: Walks with Sam

Walks with Sam: A Man, a Dog, and a Season of Awakening. David W. Berner. Roundfire Books, September 1, 2020, Trade Paperback and Audiobook, 176 pages. 

Reviewed by Susan Fox.

What does it take to make us slow down and observe the world around us? When is the last time we took our foot off the accelerator long enough to take stock of our lives to this point? What prompts us to stop and ask the questions: Who are we? Who do we want to be? And how did we get here? As we navigate the seasons of life, such moments of introspection are generally triggered by rites of passage—marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a parent. Other times a series of small events bring to light an unexpected moment of clarity.

And sometimes all it takes is a man and his dog.

However, a catalyst or two always helps. The author, David Berner, simultaneously celebrates a sabbatical from his university teaching position and his 60^th birthday. His dog, Sam, is two years old at the time. Sam is a female black golden doodle, and as Berner contemplates their respective ages, he confronts the existential question: Will this be my last dog? 

Berner understands that with his sabbatical, he now has the gift of time. He can reflect on life-long questions, big and small, and can appreciate the humor of life’s little absurdities. And he can do it all with Sam at his side. He resolves to walk with Sam every day as part of his sabbatical. Never mind that he walks the residential streets of a Chicago suburb, and not the Pacific Crest Trail; it is a walk nonetheless, worthy of observation and meditation.

A dog rarely walks from point A to point B in a straight line; dogs go where their noses lead them. Although Berner’s musings seem to follow Sam’s lead with an eclectic range of subjects, the walks themselves are noted in chronological order. Eventually, themes begin to emerge.

Walk 2: What We Leave Behind sums up the theme of age and death. Berner’s walk begins with the indignity of following Sam with a plastic bag of dog poop. He thinks about responsibility and what it means to be a good neighbor. Then he comes across the poignant image of a child’s handprint preserved in a section of concrete sidewalk. Don’t we all want to leave our mark in the world?

He writes of yard signs and our complicated relationship with America. He muses about parenting, inspired by a chance encounter with a doe protecting her two fawns. In Walk 8: The Young and the Old, Berner regards the recklessness of youth and deficiencies of age. All we really have is now. 

Walk 12: Catch Me if You Can, is self-explanatory. After all, Sam only wants off-leash once in a while. Isn’t that what we all want occasionally?

Walk 22: The Beauty of Bacon is a simple vignette on how to change a dog’s behavior. On the other hand, accepting change in our own human lives is another matter altogether.

What does Sam see? What does she think? Berner asks the questions during Walk 26: In the Eyes. He describes Sam’s eyes as big and round, with black irises, porcelain white sclera, and ridiculously long lashes. Dog and master walk at dusk on a particular evening, and as Berner admires the sunset, he wonders if Sam sees the same thing—the red sky and beauty all around them. But Sam chases yet another squirrel, and Berner concludes that maybe dogs are with us to share something, something pure and real, beyond the “complicated emotions of a human relationship.” 

Berner notes a total of 31 walks, each contemplating a different question—some light-hearted, even whimsical, and others more serious. Eventually, he circles back to the two fundamental questions that he asked at the beginning. Who are we, exactly? And perhaps more to the point: Who do we want to be?

Walks with Sam is a short and enjoyable read, yet each walk yields a nugget of insight worthy of further consideration. I recommend this book.

Book Review: The Rooming House Gallery

The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots. Bill Mathis. Rogue Phoenix Press, June 8, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 236 pages.

Reviewed by David Steven Rappoport.

The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots is an engaging follow-up companion to The Rooming House Diaries: Life, Love & Secrets, Mathis’ novel published last year. Like Diaries, Mathis built Gallery on the same premise as Elmer Rice's famous play Street Scene—the lives of residents of the same building. Unlike Diaries, which was also a social history of Chicago, Gallery has a compressed timeline in the recent past. Yet at its best, Gallery becomes a sort of contemporary Canterbury Tales or Decameron in that there’s a strong focus on storytelling.

Manny Rodriguez, a gay Hispanic man who is disabled from childhood abuse and a significant character in Diaries, is dying. He informs his visiting nephew, Andres, and his partner, Josh, that they will inherit a property Manny owns—an old rooming house. After Manny's death, they move in, and the century-old saga of 4822 South Justine continues with the building now transforming into a community art gallery.

As in the previous volume, Mathis’ narrative is a delight to read.  The writing rarely lags, and the large and diverse group of characters is artfully handled. The tale of Andres’ mother, Bella Briseno Rodriguez, is particularly engaging. An illegal immigrant seduced and left pregnant by an unscrupulous man, Bella manipulates events that force him to marry her, teaches herself English from her son's library books, and builds a life for herself and her son in the midst of a bitter marriage.

The book has one area for improvement.  The central structural narrative—Andres’s and Josh’s struggle with the building—isn’t as engaging as the stories of characters such as Bella Briseno Rodriguez. Perhaps in the future, Mathis will write a novel that models more closely on the Decameron or Canterbury Tales, thus focusing more fully on his great strength of storytelling. Meanwhile, The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots will delight Mathis fans and make him many new ones.