Book review: Paula Munier’s Fixing Freddie (Adams Media; $19.95)
by Meera Lester
Newly
divorced Paula Munier accepted her dream job in a new town, moving her
adolescent son Mikey, their cat Isis, and dog Shakespeare into a cottage
on a lake in Massachusetts. Worried about uprooting her son, making the
mortgage payments, and starting over again as a single mom, the last
thing she needed or wanted was a new puppy.
Yet she kept her
promise to Mikey that they could get one, even if it meant they wouldn’t
have enough money to buy the new washer.
Mikey searched the
Internet for a puppy and found a place called Puppy Palace 48 miles from
their home. Paula worried that it was wrong to purchase a dog when
there were so many that needed to be adopted. She feared that the Puppy
Palace "might be one of those horrible puppy factories PETA is always
going on about," then explained to Mikey what PETA is—People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal protection group.
“Clean
and cheerful, it looked more like a well-run daycare center than the
sordid puppy mill of my imagination," Munier wrote of Puppy Palace. It
offered bright rooms and adorable puppies, "all of whom would fit
perfectly into a Kate Spade bag, even once they were full-grown… ‘If
Paris Hilton were running a kennel,’ I thought, ‘this would be it.’”
She
and her son already had Shakespeare, she reasoned. She'd gotten
Shakespeare (a skinny, shabby stray who might have been "once upon a
better time" a briard or Portuguese water dog) at an "Adopt a Dog"
fundraiser that she attended in Las Vegas with her mother to show
support for the cause.
Munier relented and soon the object of
Mikey’s affection was a pint-size male beagle named Freddie—six months,
house trained, and 50 percent off the $500 price tag.
The author
soon discovered that life in the lakeside cottage became a kind of
crucible with Freddie perpetuating chaos while Munier strove to provide a
stable home for her restless and independent-minded son, deal with the
bi-coastal custody arrangement with her at-times vindictive ex-husband
who has remarried, cope with the disappointment and disillusionment of
her own romantic liaisons, and seek the silver lining of each storm that
blew through her world.
As Freddie grew into adolescence, his
desire to escape, Munier points out, “was more than drive, more than
inclination, more than sport. It was a primal obsession driven by a nose
that wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop sniffing, tracking, hunting.” Freddie was
an opportunist, taking off on whenever the opportunity presented itself.
But it wasn’t only with the adolescent Freddie that the single mom had
issues. After her son had a party and their home was burglarized, she
opined, “It was time for obedience training . . . again. And not just
for Freddie, but for Mikey, too.”
Munier provided an intimate
lens through which to view the hilarious, heartwarming, humiliating and,
at times, horrendous details of life with Freddie. Through the process
of trying to “fix” Freddie, the author gained new understanding and
insights into her life as a single mom—one that included her adult
children by her first husband and, of course, Mikey, her miracle child
who must survive the world of adolescence—the true Hero’s Journey—with
its inherent pitfalls, challenges, demons, losses, and gifts.
It
doesn’t take long for readers to empathize with Munier’s need for relief
that the occasional martini or glass of red wine provides after she’s
been subjected to the hair-raising antics of the impish, misbehaving
little beagle.
Fixing Freddie is a rollicking tale, told from
the heart with honesty and courage, punctuated with poignancy, and
tempered with unstoppable optimism. It delivers the goods and raises the
benchmark for the pet memoir genre.
EDITORS’ NOTE: If you’re thinking about buying a puppy instead of adopting, please see the following articles:
Top 10 reasons to adopt, not buy, a dog
How to make sure you’re not buying from a puppy mill
Watch a video about Fixing Freddie.
Meera Lester
has written reviews for Manoa, a Pacific Journal of International
Writing, India Currents Magazine, The Small Press Magazine, and other
publications. An internationally published author of articles, columns,
and over two dozen books, her newest book is The Marriage Devotional
(Adams Media, September 2010). Lester’s Everything Law of Attraction
Book (Adams Media, 2008) has just been translated into French. She is
the author of Animal Beat’s “Dispatches from the Farmette.”
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