lost & found by jacqueline sheehan

genre: fiction

recap: {back cover} rocky's husband bob was just 42 when she discovered him lying cold and lifeless on teh bathroom floor... and rocky's world changed forever. quitting her job, chopping off all her hair, she leaves massachusetts-- reinventing her past and taking a job as animal control warden on peak's island, a tiny speck off the coast of maine and a million miles away from everything she's lost. she leaves her career as a psychologist behind, only to find friendship with a woman whose brain misfires in the most wonderful way and a young girl who is trying to disappear. rocky, a quirky and fallible character, discovers the healing process to be agonizingly slow.

but then she meets lloyd.

a large black labrador retriever, lloyd enters rocky's world with a primitive arrow sticking out of his shoulder. and so begins a remarkable friendship between a wounded woman and a wounded, lovable beast. as the unraveling mystery of lloyd's accident and missing owner leads rocky to an archery instructor who draws her in even as she finds every reason to mistrust him, she discovers the life-altering revelation that grief can be transformed... and joy does exist in unexpected places.

review: i really enjoyed this. it felt good to read something that wasn't quite so light and fluffy for a while, although the first half of the book was terribly depressing. the author does a good job of making you really feel the grief with rocky. and the parts with lloyd were just so sweet. i don't care if people think i'm crazy, dogs really do understand us, sometimes better than we understand ourselves, and they talk to us in their own sweet way. i'd read more by her, probably.