As I have enjoyed many books about dogs in the past such as The Art of Racing in the Rain, One Good Dog, and A Dog’s Purpose, I picked up this novel because I was ready for an easy listening experience after two marathon listens that I had just finished. At first, I was disappointed to find that this novel had the same narrator as another book that I did not enjoy, Merle’s Door. I had blamed the failure of the book in part to the narrator who seemed to be much like a know-it-all or something that was hard for me to put my finger on. I found, however, that the narrator suited this story much better and that perhaps I had been unfair in my review of Merle’s Door.
This novel chronicles the life of a dog whose own curiosity gets to the best of him. He leads a life quite different from the dog that I have sleeping next to me currently. This book is different from other books about dogs in that many books are about how a dog’s interaction with humans makes the lives of the humans richer and more fulfilled. This book has some of that in it but is mainly about simply the dog’s life as he encounters adventure after adventure.
It was an easy and a short read as I was hoping for. Another thing that was different about this book was that it has music occasionally incorporated into it. The author is also a musician so he wrote 4 or 5 short piano pieces that are inserted into the story. The narrator would stop, introduce a piece as being the sounds of a dog smelling grass for the first time, and then I would listen to the author’s interpretation. I wouldn’t say that the addition of music enhanced the listening experience for me all that much but it didn’t hurt it. All in all, Roam is a fun, sweet story for the dog lover out there.
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