From Publishers Weekly
Endearing when its narrator decidedly is not, the latest from Herman (Missing) takes a rather stiff, lonely, mid-40s Midwestern tenured professor of English poetry and gives her the canine humanizing treatment. Having drunk too much wine one night while surfing the Net, Jill (or "J.T. Rosen," as she is known professionally) comes across a dog-adoption site run by a do-gooder named Bill, who relinquishes a dog to her almost reluctantly. She names the puppy Phil, after men she has loved and lost. Worry over Phil's well-being and midnight walks soon have their effect; Jill warms to her students at the university (where she is known as Her Royal Highness) and to her brother, Norman, who teaches at a more glamorous institution and has "a sports car [his] wife and children could not fit into." She even stops mourning her soul-crushing move from New York and is cured of her insomnia. Phil chases away her "limping, broken, bitter night thoughts," and teaches her, more than writing poetry or teaching have, to be patient: "The kind of patient she had never been with any human being." It's a straight-up recounting of animal therapy, but Herman brings it off with grace and humor. (Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Jill Rosen, who prefers to be called J.T., is a poet and a college professor living in a small midwestern town. Originally from New York, she reads the Times instead of the local paper and wonders how she ended up in this place. After an early and disappointing love life, she has more or less sworn off men--or have they sworn off her? She lives an orderly and careful life that revolves around her work, her teaching, and her little house. Then, on a whim, she adopts a nine-week-old rescue puppy. Phillip, aka Phil, is a dog who is as careful with his emotions as she is, which appeals to Jill. Soon he has her out walking, meeting her neighbors, changing her routine, and examining her life. What develops is a very real connection between two creatures and the mutual healing it brings. Told with humor, insight, and intelligence, this novel is as thought--provoking as it is charming. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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A brief, winsome novella about an English professor at a midwestern college who gets a dog instead of a life. At almost forty-five, poet and academic Jill Rosen, after six years at her college tenured on the basis of "Great Promise," is not turning out very promising in a hurry. Originally from Queens, Jill has found a dog on a foster-care site on the Internet and ends up with a mutt that surprisingly is both intelligent and devoted to her-a dog, like her, "with dignity." Revealingly, she names it Phil, after the first names of authors whose books she keeps on her bedside table (Larkin, Roth, Lopate, Levine), though the name actually represents most memorably her first unpleasant boyfriend, Philip the first, a poet and Brooklyn College student she dated miserably for a year in New York. Yet neither Philip nor any of the other men she's dated has been good, Rosen offers with a tinge of self-pity ("Single-minded in their dedication to all-himness"), and though she drinks a bit too much wine at night before walking Phil and feels as warmly toward her students as if they were her own children, she comforts herself with the thought that she wouldn't be tempted to change lives with a single one of her friends or colleagues. In the end, this latest from academic Herman (Missing, 1990) adheres to a telling instead of showing: it's frustratingly interior, hermetically so, and feels interminable even though quite slim. The narrator's ruminations on colleagues and even her brother-a professor of linguistics who has a family and lived "in a more interesting city and earned more money than Jill did"-come off as mean-spirited and gossipy. The reader wishes in this rare instance that the lonely spinsterprofessor would meet someone-any human would do-but, no, the dog has taken over her life, and she's entirely happy about it. A dry, internal work about the underappreciated and underloved.


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