The Book: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

The Story: Despite all the hype that this book got, I went into it knowing very little. I knew it was about dogs and that it was based on the play Hamlet. Now, I know we did Hamlet in school, but I don’t remember that much.  What I do remember is The Lion King which was also based on Hamlet. So in my head, instead of lining it up, “Oh, ok, Edgar is Hamlet,” I had Edgar being Simba.  Just so ya know.

So, Edgar is a deaf-mute that is born to a family that is fixed on breeding this kind of perfect dog breed that they call Sawtelle dogs.  A lot goes into this history- Edgar’s grandpa finding the original dogs, posing a theory and making up this unique way of training these dogs to make them superior dogs.  Edgar’s grandfather has died and now Edgar’s dad (Mufasa) runs the dog-farm just like Edgar’s grandpa laid out.  Edgar has helped enough and learned enough to have his own litter to train and his parents are helping him though those steps.

Everything is rosy.

Until mean old Uncle Claude (Scar) shows up on the scene.  He’s been out of town and out of their lives for years and years.  He has a kind of sketchy past and Edgar’s family is kind of leery of him.  Claude doesn’t seem to mind and he just keeps coming around.

One day, Edgar goes out to the barn and finds his dad dead on the ground.  He totally flips out.  Everything is no longer rosy.  Especially when he sees Claude & his mom making out then sees a ghost of his dad kind of giving him clues.  So Edgar freaks out, stuff goes nuts and his mom tells him to take a couple of his dogs and run away into the woods (”Run away Simba! Run away and never return!”).

I think you know where it went from there. Hakuna matata, hakuna matata!

What I Thought: I really, really wanted to like this one.  I did.  I like books written about the country and about farms.  I like family drama. I like books with young protagonists. I like writing that is very detail heavy.  I even like animal books from time to time.  But this fell a little short for me.

I think the problem was that it hit its peak early.  The first 200 or so pages had me totally drawn in.  Then all of a sudden it just got so dull.  I actually sat it down around page 250 and read about 10 other books.  This was a work-in-progress for me for about a month.  I finally decided to come back and finish it and I really never did get back into the story.

The author really does have a good writing style- I love the flow and the words and the “simple” way of talking- but it seems like he got distracted easily.  He talked a lot about what this or that looked like or described how the dog’s coats felt, but left out how Edgar was feeling, what he was thinking.  And since Edgar was a deaf-mute, we pretty much had to rely on the narrator for this info, as Edgar wasn’t talking!

I do want to say, though, that as much as I liked the first 200 pages, I liked the last 50 or so.  It was just the middle that lost me and bored me and let me read other books in between.

Conclusion: This won’t be a book that I reread, but if you’re really into animals or into Shakespeare, you may really enjoy this one.  I’d say watch Lion King or that Hamlet where Mel Gibson takes all the acid (am I making that up?) first, because my favorite part was drawing the parallels between the stories.