RUNNING WITH HOUNDS...AND AN ENGLISH DEGREE

A young college grad deals with new experiences in love and labor in Roberts’ novel.

As this book opens, Denise feels like she’s at rock bottom. Two weeks earlier, she’d graduated college with a degree in English, a few awards for her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writing, and a mountain of student loan debt waiting to crash down on her. After a depressing round of job interviews, she’s had no luck finding work, and to make matters worse, her comfortable (and free) living arrangement with her parents is about to end, as they’re taking early admission to a retirement community. Denise shares her frustrations with her close friends Emma, Claire, and Stephanie (“we were less Sex in the City and more Restless in a Podunk Town,” Denise narrates). On a lark, she answers an ad for a job as a dogsitter. She soon meets the greyhounds’ wealthy owners, Mitchell and Ruth (“she looked like a politician's wife, always ready to greet someone important”), and the dogs themselves—pampered greyhounds named Pepper and Dante. The interview goes well, and suddenly things are looking up: She has a new job (albeit with eccentric bosses), a new sense of purpose, and even a tentative new love interest: a handsome, funny man named Logan, whom she and her friends meet during a night out. Over the course of this novel, Roberts grounds her story in a light, breezy tone, giving Denise quite a few jokes in which she comments on her own haplessness: “I was about to dig deeper into that statement, when I saw a small glob of sauce at the bottom of my hair,” goes one such passage while dining with Logan. “Seriously?” Roberts manages to maintain this snappy, effervescent tone throughout the narrative, even when it turns into something more complex and, at times, darker than an average rom-com-with-dogs tale. The attention that Roberts gives to secondary characters is especially gratifying, and it gives the entire novel a pleasingly well-populated feel.

A fast-paced and ebullient contemporary romance.