Dogchild

April 1, 2020
The Call of the Wild meets Mad Max in this blood-soaked, nihilistic thriller. Brooks' latest follows a traumatized protagonist struggling to find the right words amid copious casualty and senseless causality. The apocalypse has come and gone; the surviving world consists of two enclaves--that of the enemy Dau and the town, a walled, seaside citadel--and a no man's land populated by wild dogs. Born to teenage parents on a wagon trail, captured and raised by a dog pack, and rehumanized by his uncle, first-person narrator Jeet has always struggled to resolve his dogchild double consciousness: His is a canine soul in a human body. Gun Sur, the town's authoritarian Marshal, charges Jeet with recording the entirety of known history prior to a pending battle. When Chola Se, another dogchild, is abducted, delivered to the Dau, and brutalized by Pilgrim (Gun Sur's second-in-command) upon her return, the dogchildren must untangle the Gordian knot of her ordeal, sorting out multiple murders, double- and triple-crossings, and the inconceivable contours of the looming showdown. Racial signifiers are limited to skin tone; Jeet has brown skin, and many character names evoke a South Asian feel. Jeet's unconventional prose, lacking quotation marks, eschewing apostrophes, and employing novel compound words such as "Ime" and "weare," eventually wears smooth. Chola Se's gang rapes followed by a questionable consensual sex scene feel like a plot device for inflating the stakes, troubling an otherwise egalitarian tale. Uncompromisingly brutal and black hole-dense; howls to a niche audience. (Survival thriller. 15-18)

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2020
in this stark tale, Brooks (Born Scared) imagines a postapocalyptic future in which Jeet, a child raised by dogs, plays a vital role in the continuation of humankind. On the orders of town Marshal Gun Sur, Jeet chronicles “the times and lives of our people” leading up to looming final battle with their enemies, the Dau. He begins with his own story: being separated from his people as a baby, then brought up by a pack of Deathland dogs, and, years later, rehumanized. In the narrative’s present, Gun Sur directs Jeet to raid the Dau encampment on the same day that Chola Se, a dogchild with whom Jeet feels a connection, goes missing. In order to fulfill his mission and rescue Chola Se, Jeet must reconnect with his pack, blending his human and canine abilities and skills. After the two escape, Chola Se reveals to Jeet that she has been repeatedly raped in the camp, by Dau as well as by a leader from their own town. Together, the two seek to thwart the traitor and determine their own destiny. Brooks has created unique characters that convincingly bridge the gap between human and animal thought processes, though Chola Se’s multiple sexual assaults skew uncomfortably toward device. The unusual figures, the harrowing scenario, and the taut, relentless action sequences combine to produce a story—told without apostrophes, quotation marks, or traditional chapter breaks—that readers will find difficult to put down. Ages 14–up.

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Grades 10-1 *Starred Review* It's a dog-eat-dog?and at times human-eat-human?world in Brooks' stark postapocalyptic novel. Drought is the order of the day, as fresh water becomes increasingly scarce and the sea itself little more than an oily primordial soup. The rest is Deadlands, stalked by packs of dogs and roving Wild Ones, who choose not to live in one of the two warring human settlements. The smaller of these is where Jeet, the story's narrator, has lived for the past six years under the mentorship of Starry, who undertook Jeet's rehumanization, the process of teaching children stolen and raised by dogs to be human again. One of the literate few, Jeet is tapped by the town's leader to write an account of the town's history and war with the Dau, a daunting project that Jeet tackles by first describing his own life. Readers are thus permitted an intimate window into Jeet's past with his dog pack and his outsider position within the town. He comes off as much older than his 11 years would suggest, but this is a world that can't afford the luxury of childhood. The plot hinges on an impending, full-scale attack on the Dau, which Brooks expertly draws out to agonizing tautness. Whether read simply as a survival story or as an exploration of humanity, this ruthless book is both bark and bite.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)