When there’s a dog in the title, I’m hooked. And in “A Dog in Georgia,” author Lauren Grodstein has provided not only the titular dog, one Angel—who acted as a school crossing guard for children, for heaven’s sake, before she disappeared—but a plethora of street dogs who live, apparently mostly happily, in Georgia (the country, not the state). And when Amy Webb finds herself in need of something meaningful to accomplish, she decides to travel to Georgia and find the missing Angel.
Amy is good at saving dogs. And dogs have saved her, too. Since her childhood, dogs and cats provided the love that she didn’t get at home. And she returns those feelings many times over. She’s become an expert at helping shelter dogs fit in at home, on marketing pit bulls, at matching people with the right dog, and ultimately, at finding lost pets. She even knows how to search with a drone. Amy is a professional, if there were such a thing as a professional pet finder.
The event that pushes her to leave her home in New York City is when she suspects that her husband has been having yet another affair. He swears he is not, but Amy doesn’t know. She does know that she’s at loose ends. Her stepson, whom she’s raised as her own, is in his second year of college and out of the house. She’s not working in her husband’s restaurant anymore. She’s not teaching her writing class this semester. She needs to do something. So she buys a ticket to Georgia.
At the start of the novel, we become acquainted with Amy’s feelings of self-worth or lack thereof. Grodstein writes, “She had spent her whole life protecting her low expectations.” So she’s really not surprised that her husband Judd has strayed again. There’s also the dog in need. Angel, or in Georgian, Angelozi. A beautiful dog, “Lab-shaped, expressive brows, off-white fur, fluffy and soft.” She can’t stop watching the videos on social media of this sweet dog who is now gone. Was she kidnapped? Harmed? Stolen? Amy’s heart weeps at the thought.
The head of the rescue, Irine, reaches out online to Amy to thank her for her donations. And when Amy says she’s coming to Georgia to help find Angel, Irine insists that Amy stay with her. She tells Judd that she’s doing it for herself, but I don’t know if we believe that. She wants to save another animal. Amy lives her beliefs; she doesn’t eat animals. “She just couldn’t. These were animals that nursed their babies.” Judd, on the other hand, eats animals, cooks animals, and occasionally hunts animals. Their priorities, obviously, are very different.
But they are both devoted to Ferris, Judd’s son with his first wife, a former drug addict from a very wealthy family, and Amy has been there when Ferris’s mother disappoints him again and again. She knows firsthand how parents can let their children down. Amy has a true love for animals, and her heart aches for all the myriad ways we humans hurt animals. “The pain that humans inflicted on one another was bad enough, for the pain they inflicted on animals—the habitat loss, the factory farming, the heartless neglect—she was feeling too much…”
One of the many things that Grodstein does perfectly in this novel is her description of the behavior of shelter dogs. That many are so desperate for attention, for love, for a family, that when people walked by their cages “they were so crazed for attention they would bark their faces off and their eyes would roll back in their heads and they’d jump up and press their bodies against the cages anxiously, aggressively, scaring the nice family that had come in looking for a dog like the ones they’d seen on the Purina bag.” She also mentions the ones who are frightened and shut down, who cower in the corner of their kennels or cages, often putting their backs to the front of the cage.
She explains, correctly, that small dogs go first, also the fluffy ones. The lighter colored ones have a better chance of getting adopted than the black dogs. “Black animals were adopted less than half as frequently as light-colored animals.” And Grodstein writes about pit bulls, those most misunderstood dogs. “Big, smart pit bulls were the worst, as they were so eager to be with people, so eager to please, they they couldn’t help themselves, and would jump and pull on their leashes from the very first hello.”
In Georgia, Irine has a dozen street dogs who live in the family’s large house. And while Amy does begin the rather thankless and seemingly impossible task of finding Angel, she also gets to know Irine and her family. And at that point, the story becomes about life in Georgia, in a country that is suffering from problems of authoritarianism and government overreach. Irine’s daughter, Maia, is a teenager and very involved in protesting the new laws. There are huge protests, and there is a huge police response.
But as in Russia, protesting in Georgia can have fatal repercussions. So Amy reflects on her protests during the Women’s March and how while the crowds were marching, they also knew that they were safe. They were not (at that point in time) going to be thrown in jail. They were not going to disappear. In America, those were the luxuries we used to have. In Georgia, they never did.
Irine forces Amy to acknowledge that while President Bush was in Georgia in 2005, praising their independence, in 2008 when Russia invaded the northern part of Georgia and he was still president, he did nothing. She rebukes Amy and tells her, “And you Americans, with all your talk of liberty, you just watched all this happen and—tell me, did you even know all this was happening? Did you even bother to watch?” She goes on to say that in 2014 Russia invaded the Donbas and claimed Crimea for Russia. “Just claimed it! Can you imagine! As if Canada just came and said, we’ll take New York City, thank you, and nobody does a thing about it. You just let them have it!” And then, of course, as we all know, she explains that Russia invaded the rest of Ukraine, “and if you think they will stop there you are as silly an American as I have ever imagined.”
What Grodstein does so magnificently is to pull together Amy’s past and her present, to give us her backstory and to show us how, her whole life, she put herself last. And so, in Georgia, far from friends and family, on her own, without her husband’s credit cards and with only the meager savings she has accumulated, Amy finds out what she needs and what she wants.
“A Dog in Georgia” is an intricately crafted story of a woman on a mission that becomes a greater journey than she could have imagined at the start. It’s about looking at our lives (as Americans) through the eyes of those in countries where the freedoms we have been afforded in the past were never part of their heritage. It’s about a mother’s love and the lengths that mothers will go because of that love. And it’s about dogs, because perhaps, our love for dogs and the devotion that they provide in return is a pure emotion. Emotion that doesn’t deal with human foibles and frailties, just pure love for a dog who returns that love completely and with their whole heart. And in the beautifully touching ending, Grodstein has Amy follow that love and her heart.
You won’t forget Amy, and you won’t forget the dogs. But you especially won’t forget the people of Georgia, their love for their dogs, and their desperate love of freedom, as well as the futility of protesting Russia’s iron fist. Is that futility, in all too many ways, a warning of what may be coming to America?
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.