Children's Book Review: The Leanin' Dog

The Leanin' Dog by K.A. Nuzum (HarperCollins/Cotler, $15.99, 9780061139345/0061139343, 256 pp., ages 8-12, September)

Through the eyes of 11-year-old Dessa Dean, Nuzum (A Small White Scar) shows readers what grief feels like to a child and the way the companionship of a stray revives her. The book follows the narrator and her Daddy in the week leading up to Christmas. The father struggles to kill game for their dinner, to keep a pile of wood for their stove and to give his daughter material for her studies while he is away trapping. The story opens as the girl coaches herself to venture past the boundary of her cabin: "I was almost to the edge. Almost to where the porch stopped and the wide world began." But her ears start to ache, "the losing-Mama ache." She cannot leave the safe perimeter of her cabin. Nearly daily, she works to keep her "daymares" a secret from her father, fearing that he will think she's "daft." Dessa Dean continues to experience waking nightmares--flashbacks to when, on November third, her ears deadened with frostbite, and she watched her mother die in her arms, their snowshoe tracks erased by blowing snow. But on this day, the girl, alone in the cabin, is awakened from her daymare by a scratching sound, made by a "big, fudge-colored dog." Opening up to him introduces problems: he panics at a closed door, so the girl keeps the door ajar, and the wood supply dwindles; the food she leaves for him attracts first varmints, then predators.

Nuzum illustrates the way that pain acts as a magnifier for the beauty in everyday details. As Dessa Dean decorates their modest cabin for Christmas, for instance, she realizes that the angel her father carved before she was born wears her hair the same way Mama did for special occasions, and "the angel's eyes had the soft, almond shape of the eyes of a deer, just like Mama's." The author choreographs a rhythm to the father and daughter's days, dictated by the briefer hours of daylight, the spare use of kerosene for the lamps, the preparation of food (one can almost smell the bacon) and sitting down to a meal together. As Dessa Dean opens up to the dog, she also lets her father in, and the healing begins for all three of them. This spare novel, as notable for what is left unsaid as it is for its eloquent, economical prose, lets readers know that the world around us does not stop for grief, but sometimes it sends us messengers to say that, forever altered as life may be, Willow Creek will start to thaw, the trout will begin to run downstream and the sunlight will begin to linger a little longer.--Jennifer M. Brown

 

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