The Year of the Dog

The book has an interesting structure, especially for kids. It's kind of structured in a way to have stories within stories. Not every chapter has this, but many of them do. A mother will be giving the protagonist advice or retelling her tales of growing up to her daughters, which punctuates part of the story. Sometimes there will be scenes of friends talking, but it slips into a small story from the friend of the protagonist. It's very cute, and I do like this structure a lot because it makes it kind of interesting.

The story is cute, and I think it's pretty interesting both as an early reader (for all kids) and as an introduction to how different cultures can be (for kids who aren't Chinese or Taiwanese). It's written as a form of autobiographical fiction, which is something that I find fun as a concept. In the author's note, she even says that people ask if it's true or not. There's a lot of discussion that's inspired from the author having grown up not really knowing where she belonged (a key line in one chapter has the protagonist question what she is if she's too American for Chinese people and too Chinese for American people). I think these are things that all kids should grapple with, both for themselves and for their peers.

Storywise, I don't like the excessive focus on 'being rich'. It focuses a lot on money, but the parents never really stop to tell the girl that wealth can be more than money. It'd be nice to see them say that it can be having a community, having a safe and caring family, having opportunities. It'd be so much better to see something directly contradicting the constant materialism present in childhood.

The other thing that I am not a fan of in this book are the names and how confusing it really feels, which I think comes from the fact that I have lived in Taiwan before so I have engaged with Taiwanese names and how they are transliterated into the English alphabet. For example, in the book, a Taiwanese-American girl named Melody interrogates the protagonist (who is named for and based on the author) about why she goes by 'Grace' at school and 'Pacy' at home. As I'm reading, I'm trying to figure out what characters would fit the name 'Pacy' or even which pronunciation would be accurate (pa-si, pa-shi, pei-si, pei-shi). I did try looking up what the author's name would be in Chinese characters because of this curiosity, but I was unable to find it. The same is true of her sister 'Lissy', which I can't figure out from that specific transliteration.

I think it's also confusing because I can't tell if the author is inferring that the friend (Melody) and her brothers all have one name because they only have and use their 'American' first names or if she's trying to imply that Melody, Felix, and Benji would be names commonly recognised in Taiwan. This happens again with the chapter about her new baby cousin, Albert. My primary issue around their names is that it's weirdly unclear for the point its trying to make.