Dog Boy
A Novel
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5.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A vivid, riveting novel about an abandoned boy who takes up with a pack of feral dogs
Two million children roam the streets in late twentieth-century Moscow. A four-year-old boy named Romochka, abandoned by his mother and uncle, is left to fend for himself. Curious, he follows a stray dog to its home in an abandoned church cellar on the city's outskirts. Romochka makes himself at home with Mamochka, the mother of the pack, and six other dogs as he slowly abandons his human attributes to survive two fiercely cold winters. Able to pass as either boy or dog, Romochka develops his own moral code. As the pack starts to prey on people for food with Romochka's help, he attracts the attention of local police and scientists. His future, and the pack's, will depend on his ability to remain free, but the outside world begins to close in on him as the novel reaches its gripping conclusion.
In this taut and emotionally convincing narrative, Eva Hornung explores universal themes of the human condition: the importance of home, what it means to belong to a family, the consequences of exclusion, and what our animal nature can teach us about survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gritty, richly imagined tale of an abandoned boy in a Moscow shantytown who comes to live with a pack of feral dogs more than lives up to its unlikely premise. Hornung (Fire, Fire, etc., written as Eva Sallis) tracks young Romochka s growth over two difficult years from a four-year-old whelp to a taut, street-smart alpha dog. The boy s evolution from tolerated outsider to trusted leader of this canine crew is believably portrayed, and Hornung capably draws a tawdry world of trash-pickers, beggars, and occasional friends. As he grows, so does his curiosity about the world of humans he has fled, leading to an inevitable collision when Romochka is captured by a scientist who wants to use him to further his career. Hornung knows how to wring emotion from a scene, making the bond between boy and dog deeply felt, while rarely running afoul of sentimentality. In her hands, this engrossing story becomes both an investigation into humanity and a vivid portrait of one of Russia s millions of lost children.
