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Started Early, Took My Dog (2010)

by Kate Atkinson

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: Jackson Brodie (4)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,1131884,296 (3.81)318
Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective leading a quiet life, makes a snap decision to relieve habitual offender Kelly Cross of a young child he's been dragging around town. Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, detective Jackson Brodie embarks on a different sort of rescue--that of an abused dog.… (more)
  1. 20
    When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson (KayCliff)
  2. 10
    What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Anonymous user)
  3. 00
    The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell (Imprinted)
    Imprinted: There are some strikingly similar themes involving children and parental love between these two terrific novels.
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» See also 318 mentions

English (180)  French (4)  Dutch (2)  Spanish (1)  All languages (187)
Showing 1-5 of 180 (next | show all)
These books all start like a shattered glass: tiny fragments with, seemingly, no connection. As the book proceeds, the shards all start to come together and, by the end, it all makes sense.

The one thing that I will say, is that these books are getting bleaker: the first one was rather amusing - I fear the next; Jackson may well be extinct by the end.

I shall be reading it, none the less! ( )
  the.ken.petersen | Feb 12, 2024 |
My first Kate Atkinson. My first mystery. Verdict is still out. ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
UPDATED REVIEW:

After 24 hours, I've digested this book and come away realizing it really was not enjoyable. I had to get to the very last quarter of the book to even begin to find the story. And honestly, Tilly was just unnecessary to the whole plot. She could have appeared as a good samaritan to save Tracy and there was no need to delve into her whole psyche and the whole stairway to memory loss. There are just so many threads flapping in the wind and the last chapters do little to crochet them into a neat and appealing tea cozy.

OLD REVIEW: Started out not giving a toss about any of the characters and I was a little exhausted with the hundreds of smaller stories that were off-shoots from the action taking place:

Example:

Tracy was taking Courtney to the park. They had "fun" and so naturally I would want to read more about this but to get to the point of their outing I needed to read through an epic internal dialogue about Tracy's past and her trip with her parents and cold-boiled eggs which her father would swallow whole. I felt like a lot of the author's background stories were basically in parenthesis and I would have loved to just gloss over it and move on but that would have left me with about 20 or 30 pages of the actual book.

But, and there is a but. By the time I got to page 226, I was onboard for the rest of the story and I had already pieced together what had happened so there really wasn't a "Great Reveal" at the end for me. ( )
  RoadtripReader | Aug 24, 2023 |
(43) I am not sure why I stopped reading the Jackson Brodie series. Atkinson is definitely one of my favorite writers. In this one Jackson is on the trail of missing young girls. Or maybe adults who were once missing trying to find out who they are? As usual there are multiple storylines and it is hard to see how they intersect. I also could not remember anything about Jackson's personal life, but it seems it will continue to be dysfunctional. No new love interest in this one - unless you count a little border terrier that Jackson steals from its rightful owner when he witnesses maltreatment. And there is the theme right there - is it right to take someone from a shitty parent in an extra-judicial fashion and give them a new life? The conclusions are ambiguous here.

I seem to recall liking 'One Good Turn', and 'When will there be Good News' a bit better than this installment. The same elements were present the humor, the seemingly separate but interwoven storylines. But in this one they were not all as equally compelling as I remember from the previous novels. For instance, I thought all the interludes with 'Silly Tilly,' and her unrelated backstory were unnecessary and not compelling.

But overall - I enjoy Jackson's wry and sardonic wit and his 'shit happens.' kind of approach to life. Definitely will think twice about eating sausages in a Bed and Breakfast... Even though I didn't like this one quite as much, I look forward to soon reading the newest installment. ( )
  jhowell | Aug 13, 2023 |
Kate Atkinson is undeniably a good writer, but she definitely has her tics. At the beginning of this book I was finding myself sort of annoyed by the excessive storytelling: the many intricate details of each separate character and storyline as they all moved inevitably toward each other. With that many details, you know some of them are going to be relevant later on, some of them are not, but you have no idea which are which and it's impossible to internalize them all so some of them end up getting lost. Hopefully not the wrong ones. However, that said, by the time the climax began to approach, and the stories came closer together and became explained (aha! Jackson...) I found myself unwilling to put it down. And by the time the codas had unravelled, I was thinking about whether there is a Jackson Brodie #5. I also want to read more stuff by Kate Atkinson. So, as usual this is a complicated story that is ultimately satisfying. There is one tiny loose end, which may even be my imagination, but a tiny thing like that is sometimes more noticeable in a book filled with details, almost all of them meaningful. ( )
  karenchase | Jun 14, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 180 (next | show all)
“Started Early, Took My Dog” — with a wonderful title from Emily Dickinson, summoning a poem that is as artfully enshrouded as this novel — is... jampacked with echoes, parallels, doppelgängers, sneaky omissions and authorial attempts to mislead. For Ms. Atkinson this is business as usual and often a source of final-act revelatory glee. But it doesn’t coalesce as neatly as this series’s earlier installments have.
 
Kate Atkinson began as a prize-winning literary novelist with Behind the Scenes at the Museum and has, like Michael Dibdin and Ian Rankin before, reinvented herself by using the tropes of detective fiction. She's just as serious and formally interesting as ever, only her novels featuring the ex-policeman Jackson Brodie involve unravelling a couple of murders. With their startling first chapters, appealing cast of familiar characters and meticulous observation of contemporary reality they read like Elizabeth George crossed with Elizabeth Bowen.

The fourth, Started Early, Took My Dog is about child abduction, and people who fall through the cracks of modern Britain unless somebody bothers to help. The narrative switches between the 1970s and today with dizzying, at times perplexing, skill. Tracy, its hefty heroine is, like Brodie, ex-police. As a young copper she found a starving, half-frozen child in a flat with his murdered mother. Tracy persists in asking questions, and the child disappears.

Atkinson's detective novels capture the strangeness of modern times, and our supposedly atomised lives, with spiky wit, emotional intelligence and consummate cleverness. All her novels are about the choices that we make and the things we leave behind; about parenthood and the anguish that vulnerability brings. Above all, they scrutinise an England too few literary novelists seem to notice, or care about.
added by VivienneR | editThe Independent, Amanda Craig (Sep 3, 2010)
 
So much of the narrative is retrospective or interior that there's not much urgency to unfolding events, however highly coloured. And there's a rhetorical whimsy reminiscent of some of Atkinson's earlier books, a devil-may-care gesturing at the novel's own fictionality, which can leave the characters threatening to float free of our trust in them. But we follow their digressive, meandering voices avidly as they circle around their own particular loves and losses, all knitted together with Atkinson's extraordinary combination of wit, plain-speaking, tenderness and control. She's an old hand at paradox now: "All roads lead home," says Julia. "All roads lead away from home," Jackson replies.
 

» Add other authors (2 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Kate Atkinsonprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bell, NicholasNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Isaacs, JasonNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Malcolm, GraemeNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Original title
Alternative titles
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People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Traditional
'I was just cleaning up the place a bit.'
Peter Sutcliffe
Dedication
For my father
First words
Leeds: 'Motorway City of the Seventies'. A proud slogan.
Quotations
"Hoop' is een ding met veren -
dat neerstrijkt in de ziel -
een melodie zingt zonder tekst -
en nooit stopt - met zijn lied -

het zoetste klinkt - in wilde Vlaag -
De storm moet bitter zijn -
Als hij het Vogeltje beschaamt
dat velen heeft verblijd -

Ik hoorde hem in het kilste land -
En op de vreemdste Zee -
Toch vroeg het - nooit - in Extremis,
een kruimeltje - van Mij.

Emily Dickinson, vertaling van Louise van Santen.
You can't change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present.
Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn't think that the place he had started from existed anymore.
Title from the Emily Dickinson poem (656):

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –
Schrodinger ... and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora's box and were dining on a can of worms.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective leading a quiet life, makes a snap decision to relieve habitual offender Kelly Cross of a young child he's been dragging around town. Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, detective Jackson Brodie embarks on a different sort of rescue--that of an abused dog.

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Book description
A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a shocking impulse purchase. That one moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn.

Witnesses to Tracy's outrageous exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.

Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plots with Dickensian brilliance in a tale peopled with unlikely heroes and villains. Started Early, Took My Dog is freighted with wit, wisdom and a fierce moral intelligence. It confirms Kate Atkinson's position as one of the great writers of our time.
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Hachette Book Group

3 editions of this book were published by Hachette Book Group.

Editions: 1607886782, 0316120537, 0316066737

 

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