Steven Rowley's first novel, Lily and the Octopus, is a startling, scintillating experience, both funny and emotionally wrenching: a story that shatters all expectations.
Ted Flask has a contented home life with an aging dachshund named Lily. They are comfortable in their routines: pizza on Sundays, Monopoly on Fridays, talking about cute boys on Thursdays. They have inside jokes and holiday traditions. Lily holds up her end of conversations, although as a dog she is of course distractible, and her memory can be short.
There is a new addition to their household, an octopus, and he has a death grip on Lily's head. She begins to have seizures. She weakens. As the octopus's tentacles tighten around Lily's precious small head, Ted realizes he has a fight on his hands.
As Ted battles the octopus and tries to sustain his darling, he ends up examining every aspect of his own life, his own shortcomings and the strengths he discovers in himself, almost by surprise. His journey, then, is not only about a man and his dog but about breaking out of life's stalemates.
Imaginative, ever-astonishing, suspenseful and wise, Rowley's surprising novel is thoroughly gut-wrenching, but well worth the pain. With a winning dog at its robust heart, no reader could ask for more. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia