Baby (review)

Foster care is nothing new to fifteen-year-old Baby, but she's startled by her new placement in rural New England with Fred and Mary Potter, a quiet older couple whose main passion is the raising and racing of sled dogs. Initially resistant Baby is soon a convert to the joys of running sled dogs, and she's particularly smitten with snow-white Laika, a young bitch. When Baby's boyfriend, Bobby, comes to finally spirit her away, she finds herself taking Laika, who is increasingly unwelcome and unhappy amid Baby's aimless and shadowy existence. Monninger takes a fairly standard foster-kid plot and revivifies it through his spare and finely honed style. Baby's voice has more than a touch of Hemingway to it, yet there's a taut contemporaneousness to the combination of Baby's alienated account and the interpolated stories of dogs, especially Laika's namesake; the symbolism of Baby's canine experience is quiet and unobtrusive, with events and stories operating effectively on the manifest level as well. The New Hampshire winter cold is also a constant presence, with the season a very different force in different situations; the descriptions of dog-sledding, the sheer joy of adrenaline in the frosty air, the blur of dogs in motion, and the heady thrill of pack participation are keenly observed. Readers may not be surprised that Baby finally grows sufficiently beyond Bobby's thrall to know what's good for her, but they'll find the trip warming beneath its crisp exterior.