A Fair Trade Book
Title: The Shepherd the Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog
Author: Dave Barry
Author's web site: http://www.davebarry.com/
Date: 2006
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0-399-15413-2
Length: 111 pages
Illustrations: many period-reprint graphics, some in color
Quote: “My mom laughs at the commercials, especially the actress pretending to be the mother, who’s wearing a dress and pearls...when Mom drives us to school she’s usually wearing a bathrobe and hair curlers.”
A big part of Dave Barry's Christmas comedy novelette is the 1960s nostalgia. Illustrations start with Santa Claus smoking a cigarette, and continue to be period-specific to the point of parody, throughout.
Then there’s the early adolescent narrator, Doug Barnes, who is at the stage in life where he’d like to impress people by being mature and sophisticated, but the next best thing is to impress them by being silly. In a previous Christmas pageant he offered the doll representing the baby Jesus a Rolodex instead of a package representing myrrh. Though bratty at times, Doug is beginning to feel some vestiges of empathy for his baby sister and their old dog Frank, the “cross between a Labrador retriever and a Saint Bernard and an aircraft carrier” who “wasn’t doing so good...just getting too old.”
You know the sort of thing Dave Barry is going to do with this material. For details, read the book. It’s funny and heartwarming, full of love-of-dogs-and-children, as you would have expected.
Anyone who’s not already read this book would appreciate finding it in their Christmas stocking. If you buy it now, you’ll have plenty of time to read it first...but read carefully: my copy of this book was definitely not built to last.
Actually, for a novel about members of a church, in which the plot features a Christian holiday and the climactic scene takes place inside the church building, this story still manages to seem more comic than religious. Nevertheless...is the spirit of a joyful religious holiday incompatible with the spirit of laughter?
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