Thoughts before reading:
We're right back to the usual light-hearted fare... this plot sounds so random, like the AMM just decided she wanted to promote the guide dog foundation one day by having a whole book written about it.
The basics:
Kristy wakes up on a pleasant spring Saturday to find Watson looking over info on guide dogs. He explains that he and Elizabeth are thinking about getting one to train. One of his coworkers has a daughter who lost her sight, so the company wants to sponsor a dog, and Watson wants to get more personally involved by becoming a "puppy walker". That's the person who raises the future guide dog from 8 weeks to 14 months old. The dog then returns to the foundation and enters the formal guide dog training.
After passing their interview, Kristy's family gets a puppy named Scout, and they all start learning how to train her.
Kristy tells the BSC the news, and they all start thinking about Deb Cooper, the girl who inspired the project. She's 12, goes to school with Shannon, and lost her eyesight due to glaucoma. Of course, now that it's relevant to the plot, the Cooper family starts to need babysitters too. Mary Anne gets a job sitting for Deb's little brothers: 8 year old Mark, and 4 year old Jed. Kristy also gets a job staying with Deb while her parents are out. She's very angry about losing her vision, and refuses to see anyone or do anything.
Various BSC members try to help Deb, but she's so bitter, angry, and rude to everyone that they don't make much progress. There's even an incident while Kristy's sitting where she tries to go to the video store alone and ends up lost and disoriented in the middle of the street.
By the end of this book, Deb's working with an orientation/movement coach, and she's hoping for a guide dog of her own when she turns 16. (That's the youngest they assign them apparently.)
Timeline:
Begins on the first Saturday of April.
Misc. thoughts:
*Ghostwritten by Nola Thacker.
*There's some good continuity in here about Watson's health and lifestyle changes.
*Watson and Nannie are thinking about starting a water garden, which I guess is like a small pond?
*Raising and bonding with a dog for an entire year, then giving it up, sounds terrible. I think it's very admirable, but I don't think I could do it. I get really emotional about animals.
*My dog had glaucoma, and it was the effing worst. I don't have any sympathy for Deb though, because she's got way too much for herself.
*Mary Anne babysits for Ben Hobart in here? I need to give up trying to make sense of the ages in these books, but I like logical things, so it's really hard for me...
*This book really has no plot whatsoever, it's just teaching the reader all about guide dogs, blindness, the importance of the dogs, and how to train them. It's basically a much less effective version of Jessi's Secret Language. Since Matt is a thousand times more likeable than Deb, however, this doesn't have nearly the impact or sweetness of that story.
*As the series wears on and the writers run out of ideas, the books are getting shorter. This was only 114 pages, and the last book was 120. The older books usually came in around 140-160. In books this short, that's a pretty big difference.
*I REALLY don't think much of the Coopers' parenting. They shouldn't have let Deb act so rudely to them, or other people. It's not doing her any favors at all. They're just teaching her that she has a right to feel sorry for herself, which maybe she does, but that's not going to help in out in life. No matter what, this is her reality now and she doesn't have any choice but to figure it out. Letting her behave any way she wants because they pity her just creates a big problem for Deb. She should also be in therapy, because there's a lot of things she needs to work through.
Books mentioned:
*Nate the Great, by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
My rating:
2 stars. I probably would have liked this as a kid, just because of all the dogs in it. Now, it just read like a PSA about guide dogs.
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