The Mountaintop School for Dogs And Other Second Chances
Ellen Cooney, 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544236158
Summary
When twenty-four year old Evie impulsively ventures to the mountaintop Sanctuary to learn to become a dog trainer, she’s proceeding under falsehoods, having lied on her application.
She claimed to have experience with animals without explaining it was all from books, and she never mentioned the rehab program she’s just now coming out of. But she hadn’t known that the Sanctuary is a secret command center for a rescue network that engages in kidnappings of abused dogs, or that she’d be the only training-trainee they have.
Evie’s unique, vivid voice is a force of nature, and she meets her matches in the indomitable Mrs. Auberchon and other members of the staff, including a mysterious teenager named Giant George and an elderly golden retriever, Boomer, the Sanctuary’s butler.
At the heart of the novel are the wounded, healing dogs whose pasts, as Evie puts it, need to be erased like viruses on a computer: Tasha the Rottweiler, Alfie the greyhound, Shadow the hound mix, Dora the Scottie, Hank the lab/pit bull, Josie the yappy and deaf “small mix,” and Dapple the brood hound, whose rescue becomes Evie’s first kidnapping. These dogs meet all expectations as beautifully drawn, fully realized, unforgettable characters.
And as Evie begins her new education, which often involves learning things about cruelty and inhumanity she will wish she doesn’t know, the real adventure of Mountaintop opens up and keeps on opening, charged with her anger, convictions, intelligence, humor, mistakes, and most of all, her alive-ness.. (From the publisher.)