![]() “I know what that’s like,” she replies. McKenzie has created a wonderful addition to the crew of damaged characters beloved by readers, so very endearing and real. “Are you a grunion?” she asks him, once safe on the beach. Their experiences there will compete in death-defying drama with Penny’s childhood memory of being saved from an untimely watery demise by a talking fish. ![]() With his second wife kicking him out of the house, he asks Penny to accompany him to Australia to make one last search for her parents, who disappeared into the Outback five years earlier. ![]() Pincer’s situation becomes increasingly fraught, Penny’s attention is distracted by her grandfather. His other dog is a Pomeranian known as Kweecoats, though his collar tag says QUIXOTE, surely a nod to the original picaresque novel of which this is a gleeful descendant. Pincer’s accountant, a toupéed teddy bear of a man who drives a battered Econoline van he calls the Dog of the North. ” She’s picked up at the Santa Barbara train station by Burt Lampey, her grandmother Dr. “In the past twenty-four hours,” she says at the outset, “I’d abruptly left my job, burning a bridge that I was happy to cross for the last time, and I’d confronted my husband Sherman: I know all about Bebe Sinatra and the cocaine. Sadly, no matter how many times you try to pause so it won’t be over, it still ends-with a decent outcome for its protagonist, thank heaven, because by that time you will be fully in love with Penny, a socially awkward, deeply idiosyncratic misfit with trauma in her past, somewhere on the spectrum between Elizabeth Zott of Lessons in Chemistry and Eleanor Oliphant of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. One suspects it also reflects McKenzie’s state of mind while writing this delightful narrative, and it soon becomes relatable for the enchanted reader. The unattributed epigraph of this book-”For a while I went berserk, and wished it would never end…”-is eventually revealed to be an excerpt from the journal of one of the characters. Ron Charles, The Washington Post THE DOG OF THE NORTH Kirkus
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