The Dust of 100 Dogs, A.S. King

Carol Hegarty, Girl Running With Dog

(April 14, 2009) Again, a synopsis that sounded fabulous:

In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body—with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.

Does that not sound great? So I was expecting something like The Pirates of the Caribbean writ modern, or maybe The Golden Compass with a nautical twist, or even possibly a kind of historical saga like the Outlander books.

But it’s not that at all -- it's more like Angela's Ashes minus the humour mixed with a Raymond Chandler-style hard-boiled detective novel minus the noir stylishness. It’s just sad and depressing from beginning to end. People are cruel to each other now, and were cruel to each other 400 years ago, and are also cruel to dogs.

There is nothing redeeming at all. Nobody is likable, nothing is presented in contrast to the bleakness of human life, there’s nothing to invest in whatsoever.

It’s hard to believe this book falls into the Young Adult category. If this is the literature young adults want and / or the literature publishers think they should have, then... yikes.

Actually, it seemed at times that I was reading extracts from a much longer novel, perhaps a 700-pager. The plot set-up gives the impression of a way longer trajectory than it eventually takes, and there are many scenes and characters that are amplified and expanded upon in such a way that you think they’re going to be important eventually... but they never are. There’s all kinds of gratuitous gore, the result of either violence or the indignities of the human body or both, which probably was the tipping point for the YA categorization, because it’s totally adolescent. But I could see it all working in a long historical novel full of richly imagined passages through which we come to know and like the heroine, or learn fascinating details about the differences between life in the 1660s and now, or gain crucial contextual knowledge that puts a little clothing on some narrative themes.

I could totally see that novel existing, and being decent, and the author being told, “We’ll only publish this if you cut it back to 300 pages.... and you must retain all the gory bits intact.” That would explain Dust. The only other explanation I can imagine is some kind of authorial ADHD.

I’m giving it a star only because the concept was so great, and because there are lots of descriptions of jewellery.