It's a Dog's Life
so you might as well enjoy it!
by Dr. Sparkus T. Mutt
edited by P.V. Alvarado
illustrated by Andrea Alvarado
Piggy Press, Panama 2002
139 pages, paperback


If you are a regular reader of the fun section in The Panama News, you will have read some of this book. You will of course notice the canine perspective, and if you're a bit more perceptive you will catch the educator's ethic of the editor, Pat Alvarado, who taught in the American schools down here for many years.

From the point of view of a newspaper editor with a history degree, this work revives memories of the writings of Archie and Mehitabel, the cockroach and cat who wrote on the typewriter of the late journalist Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878-1937) at night. For a kid who was advanced at reading, the Archie and Mehitabel stories stood out as rare non-boring highlights in a usually tedious elementary school literary education.

Thus "It's a Dog's Life" is one of those books that you might want to give to a kid who's having no problem learning to read, to whom you want to impart the lesson that it's fun to read.

Let's not dismiss this work as kids' stuff, however. The vocabulary isn't "dumbed down." The themes are universal, and, like the best of TV cartoons, the jokes are on several levels. Like Rocky and Bullwinkle's confrontations with Boris, Natasha, Fearless Leader and Mr. Big; or like Bugs Bunny calling a square dance, this is humor that adults will enjoy along with kids, often for different reasons. This layered style also makes "It's a Dog's Life" a good book of bedtime stories for parents to read to a younger child who isn't yet literate.

This could be a breakthrough book for Panama's little band of English-language writers. It's the sort of thing that very well might end up in school libraries throughout the English-speaking world. It could be the most notable dog's-eye literary work since James Thurber's time. That, of course, largely depends on the vagaries of the global publishing oligopoly, which if this book catches on would be bidding for the rights to put out a much larger-run edition than Piggy Press can afford.

To place your order, and to check out Pat Alvarado's other works, visit Piggy Press at http://www.piggypress.com/ or send her an email at piggybooks@yahoo.com.

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