I had no idea who this woman was until I read Birdie and Harlow (I came across this book in the “coming soon” section of the library’s website) but apparently she had a popular blog for a long time that seems to be defunct now. I thought it might be fun to read a light book about a dog owner but it was actually kind of disturbing.
First she gets the dog on a wild impulse with no knowledge of anything from a clearly bad backyard breeder because they let her take the dog home despite having zero knowledge of the breed or dog ownership. She doesn’t even have regular employment for much of the dog’s life until she starts selling t-shirts out of her home and that takes off.
It was strange to read someone so “obsessed” with her dog about how she didn’t seem in a hurry to get a lump on her dog’s head checked out the first time despite it growing quickly. She took six months to get him to a vet and then it was too late.
The remove it and then when they know he isn’t doing well and is growing again, she doesn’t seem to rush in to get it checked out again and time drags on. Could her dog have benefited from earlier intervention? There are hundreds of mentions of how important the dog was to her but she seemed to neglect very basic level car routinely.
It sounds like pregnancy and the baby was a huge distraction and led to the neglect of Harlow so I hope she can manage her new dogs now with a second baby. I am puzzled how and why the dog breeder she got the first dog from contacted her asking if she wanted a puppy after ten years. Why does she keep getting dogs if she can’t handle them and children?
I also thought it was weird she said she grew up in a era where people used shock collars and rubbed their dogs nose in the carpet. She’s only in her mid-30s. Her family might have been really regressive but that sort of thing has been advised against for decades. She didn’t grow up in some “different” time. She grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s.
A lot of this takes place during Covid and they didn’t seem to follow any guidelines for any length of time, she talked about lots of travel and gatherings which was a little off putting. She just seems like a very irresponsible person.
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I just wanted to check on you and make sure you’re okay? You clearly read this book with an extremely negative and pessimistic mindset. Your review of this book is a far stretch, pulling out anything negative you could find. Or maybe that’s the job of a critic? I don’t know. Those of us who are mothers and have experienced life and loss really resonated with the book. I feel like people deserve to know the truth about the joy and validity this book brings to mothers by the author opening her heart to us.
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I’m quite fine. As I said, I went into this book with no expectations or knowledge of who this woman is.
It’s wild to imply I haven’t “experienced life and loss” because I didn’t like a book and found the woman who wrote it to be strange and a neglectful dog owner.
She freely admitted to all of it these odd behaviors and seemed to think nothing of it. If she didn’t want the public to to know these things and form opinions about them she should have left them out.
It’s okay to not like a book and understand what you are reading. If you prefer to keep things more surface level that’s fine. It’s not being critical to understand what you are reading though.
You are welcome to publish love letters to the book all over the internet if you’d like. Tracking down people who didn’t like the book and expressing “concern” is an interesting choice.
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