Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"I do it for the joy it brings
because I'm a joyful girl."

-- Ani Difranco, "Joyful Girl"

I need to complete this review promptly. Shari has extracted a promise that I will give Joyful Girl -- our flat-coated retriever -- a bath this afternoon.

Shari is forever encouraging me to take Joyful for more walks and to refrain from always topping Joyful's nightly dinner with one of those little packets of parmesan cheese that come from the pizza places. (Joyful's affinity for dog food parmesan has been responsible for my steadily using up years' worth of packets we'd accumulated.) Our once-upon-a-puppy will be celebrating her tenth birthday in a few months. Sam Wise, her goofy son who also resides here at the farm, is now five.

Back amidst my own puppy hood days -- circa 1959 -- a picture book that I picked up in the Plainview Library and begged Mom to read to me over and over again was Marguerite Henry's MULEY-EARS: NOBODY'S DOG. Over the years since then, I have regularly experienced all sorts of great books involving stray dogs. From Henry Huggins finding Ribsy, to Opal Buloni's initial encounter with Winn-Dixie, to the stray dog in Mary Pope Osborne's ADALINE FALLING STAR, and JJ's discovery of Bran in THE NEW POLICEMAN, I have read many stray dog stories that have touched me and stayed with me.

"Just thinking about tomorrow,
Clears away the cobwebs, and the sorrow
'Till there's none."
-- Annie singing to Sandy

Fifty years ago, in 1957, I was too young to pay attention to the story of the dog named Laika who orbited the Earth in Sputnik II. A hastily-assembled space mission envisioned by Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was decided that a dog would go along for the ride. As we find out late in Nick Abadzis' story, LAIKA, no provision was made for bringing the dog back to Earth alive.

The author-illustrator has immersed himself in tracking down the histories of Laika, of the Space Race, the Cold War, and earlier Russian events in order to create an exceptional graphic novel that portrays the historically-based tale of the stray dog-turned-fated space explorer who was dubbed Muttnik in the US. But that is only the latter two-thirds of the book. The story that can be determined is preceded by an imagined how-she-came-to-be-a-stray dog childhood about which there is, of course, no information.

The tragic story of Laika's demise for the sake of Soviet glory centers around the interplay of three lives: Laika, Laika's loving female trainer, and the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program.

To think that the death of a stray dog unknown to me and back fifty years in the past could make my heart hurt so badly certainly attests to the remarkable job British artist-writer Nick Abadzis has accomplished.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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