So excited just received Patricia McConnell's new book through the post. Better make sure I have a box of tissues handy as her writing always makes me cry, as well as laugh .
Oooh, do make sure and give us a review! The biggest tear-jerker for me was the video of Sophia Yin talking about her road to force-free training.
OK, so I finished this book a couple of days ago and have been trying to decide what to write as a review. I think it's safe to say that the content was probably not quite what I was expecting and having read the book the title definitely has a double meaning. Of all Trisha McConnell's books this is most definitely the most personal. The book is beautifully and simply written and really comes from the heart. If you are expecting a book with lots of training advice and anecdotes this is not the book for you. This is about Trisha's life and her battles with her own personal demons. It'sounds not just her own demons she is battling, it us also he dearly loved dog Will's demons As with Trisha's book 'For the love of a dog' I cried buckets of tears over some paragraphs and her enduring love for her dogs shines through. A few weeks ago in a post I mentioned that trainers don't always have perfect dogs and sometimes have very reactive dogs. Will definitely falls into the reactive dog category and how Trisha manages him has all the key elements of the advice we frequently see but what is clear is that change can happen very slowly over many months if not years. I loved this book and still keep thinking and going back to read some parts again and one paragraph that I keep coming back to is this "It is one thing to love a dog, to love him so much that sometimes you ache talking about him........I once wrote about Luke: " I imagine his death as if all the oxygen is sucked out of the air, and I am expected to live without it." Of course he died, and of course I didn't - but it took me years to stop grieving his untimely death from kidney failure when he was only twelve years old."
Thank you for the review, have received my copy now, I am hoping to read it on holiday next month in Scotland. I think I am going to find it quite tough to read methinks. I do love her books though
I'm planning to take it away with me to read again next month while in S Wales for a week on holiday. I have no doubt that I will still shed some tears as I read - I have come to the conclusion that it's a risk I take reading Trisha although I do love her books. Hope you enjoy, if that's the right word, the book @Beanwood
