The Dust of 100 Dogs

n the 1600s, Emer Morrissey was a frightful pirate marauding the Caribbean seas in search of treasure to steal and hoping to once again meet her long-lost love. That is, until the night she is cursed to one hundred lives as a dog. One hundred dog lifetimes later, Emer is back in the body of Saffron Adams, the hope of her lower middle-class family. Unfortunately for the Adams family, Emer has no interest in lifting the family out of poverty through higher education, but she may just know where to find the buried treasure she left behind.

I really thought that The Dust of a 100 Dogs had a really fun concept that I would enjoy, but nearly the whole thing didn’t work for me. The characters are woefully one dimensional. The good characters show more are too good, the evil characters too evil, the conflicts too easily begun and resolved, and the reincarnation portrayed poorly. At the beginning of the novel, Saffron’s thoughts and actions are nearly entirely Emer’s. If they are not the same person, then Saffron is utterly controlled by Emer, driven by Emer’s desire to have back the treasure denied to her and filled with Emer’s violent pirate thoughts. By the end of the book, however, it was like King made a last-minute decision that Saffron ought to have a voice too, but it was too little too late to be anything short of a tack on.

Flashbacks to Emer’s early life in an Ireland being destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s armies are the best and most compelling part of this book, perhaps because it’s the only part that feels genuine. Once Emer flees the husband her uncle has sold her to in the aftermath of the war, Emer, desperate, decides she’ll board a ship bound for the Caribbean, where other men are looking for wives or worse. This is where things fell apart for me. For one, if you ran away from a lousy, rotten husband to be impoverished on the streets of Paris, why would you think you’d make out any better rolling the dice on a mystery husband in the Caribbean? For two, I just never really managed to buy Emer as a proper pirate. She kind of dithers her way into the whole thing after fleeing the next d-bag husband in line, and using her pent-up loathing for all the men who took what wasn’t theirs in a battle. All the sudden, she’s a sea captain with pirate fleet robbing Spanish treasure ships. There doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it other than she doesn’t want to get married to a French d-bag and she need something to do while she moons over the lost love her of her Irish youth that she hopes against hope to meet again. She’s supposed to be this feared killer, but it all seems to be a bit of an act, and a poor one.

Maybe I’m expecting too much. This is, after all, a swashbuckling YA tale of reincarnation and piracy. I’m probably not supposed to read so much into it. I’m supposed to appreciate Emer as a strong female character and enjoy her adventures at sea. However, despite her murderous abilities, she somehow never stopped seeming like victim to me, and The Dust of a 100 Dogs, with its many lifetimes’ worth of stories to tell never came together into the more multi-dimensional story I was hoping for. show less

Young Emer Morrisey has a loving family and a happy childhood until her parents are brutally killed and her village destroyed during Cromwell's invasion of Ireland. From that point on, Emer's life is one disappointment after another: poverty, arranged marriage, abusive uncle, hunger, imprisonment, and rape. It's no wonder that she loses hope in goodness and kindness and, when fate brings her to the pirate haven of Tortuga, she decides to take from others as viciously as life has taken from her. That's right--Emer is kicking ass and taking names as the captain of her own pirate ship and it's not long before she manages to make a name for herself as one of the most cunning and bloodthirsty pirates to ever sail the seven seas. When Emer show more crosses the wrong man, she is killed and cursed with "The Dust of 100 Dogs," meaning that she will be reincarnated 100 times as a dog before finally being reincarnated as a human being and able to take care of unfinished business.

The novel begins with the birth of Saffron Adams, the human reincarnation of Emer after she has endured several canine lifetimes. Saffron is her own person, yet still has all of Emer's memories and knowledge. As Saffron searches for the treasure Emer was able to bury before her death, the novel deftly switches from past to present as we learn of Emer's past and Saffron's future. If all of this sounds bizarre and confusing, well, it is, but in a good way. The novel maintains suspense and draws all of the storylines together to a satisfactory conclusion. The one expectation that wasn't met for me is that we learn very little about Emer's dog lives; instead, the chapters are interspersed with short vignettes about what Emer the dog learned about human nature from various owners in various time periods. This was probably a smart move on the part of King as reading about the lives of 100 dogs, while intriguing, could become pretty tedious somewhere around the third Milkbone treat given, leg humped, or fire hydrant peed upon.

In reading other reviews, many readers were shocked by the brutality and the sexuality in the book (which I actually found to be pretty tame). Um, yeah, I think that it could be because it's a FREAKIN' PIRATE book and not a Disney theme park ride. Others seemed to be shocked to find such content in a young adult book, but I have no such worries. I'm sure teenagers have already figured out the sex thing, yeah? And they've probably done it from unsupervised watching of cable television and unmonitored Internet usage their parents make accessible. And it's a hell of a lot better than reading three books of Bella lusting after sparkling Edward's cold, marble . . . well, you know. (*removes self from soapbox and drags it back to the corner*)

So, yes, good book, definitely enjoyed it, and suffered no negative side effects other than a desire to walk around saying, "Arrrggghhh, me matey" to everyone I met for a week. show less

The Dust of 100 Dogs is a novel split between two protagonists, each living centuries and a hundred dog lives apart. Or perhaps there is only one protagonist who has crafted an imaginative internal fantasy life to cope with her awful family life complete with a drug-addicted sibling and parents who are at turns demanding and intrusive and neglectful. Dust is a young adult novel, but it is not the sort of young adult novel that pretends that because the protagonists are teenagers that their problems are superficial or trivial, but instead treats its characters are real people facing real nightmares.

Saffron, the first of the two central characters in the novel, is a precocious young woman, the youngest child in a poor family with a mother show more who is an alcoholic, a father who is emotionally destroyed by his service in Vietnam, and a collection of older siblings who range from indifferent to hostile. She demonstrates her intellectual gifts at a young age, and from that point forward her mother invests all her hopes and dreams into her, banking on Saffron's future success to serve as her ticket out of poverty and despair. But Saffron harbors a secret as well - her apparent intelligence is the result of being the reincarnation of the 17th century pirate Emer Morrisey, who was cursed and condemned to live one hundred lives as a dog before being reborn as a human.

Or so Saffron believes. And there is no reason not to believe that this is entirely true. But there is also some reason to regard Saffron's memories of being an abused Irish girl, sold unwillingly into marriage who escaped to the Caribbean and turned pirate, as anything other than the fantasies of a neglected but bright child desperate to escape the poverty of her life and the crushing expectations her otherwise neglectful parents place upon her. And the story leaps back and forth between Saffron's life in modern-day Pennsylvania and Emer's life first in rural Ireland, then in Paris, and finally in Tortuga, Jamaica, and other Caribbean locales. With the exception of the opening scene, the stories of both women are told more or less in order, interwoven as the narrative moves back and forth between the 17th and the 20th centuries.

Of the two, Emer's life is clearly the harsher one - first Cromwell destroys her village and in the process kills her family, then she is taken in after a fashion by her cowardly and abusive uncle who eventually sells her against her will into an arranged marriage with a wealthy Frenchman despite her being clearly in love with an Irish boy. Emer refuses to accept her fate, and after a taste of life as a vagabond on the streets of Paris heads to the Caribbean lured by the promise of a husband. Once again betrayed, Emer is raped instead, and disguises herself as a man to take service as a sailor, eventually turning pirate. She channels her rage into her efforts, and returns to the needlework she had learned as a child, sewing ever more elaborate capes to wear while plundering Spanish ships.

Running parallel to Emer's story is Saffron's story. Born in Pennsylvania and saddled with an intellect that creates expectations and a family that seems to live solely to pressure Saffron to fulfill those expectations so they can escape their own self-inflicted misery, she plots her escape. Saffron lives in that desert netherworld with parents who mostly neglect her because they simply do not understand her, but when she displays any form of independence from the plan they have laid out for her (for their own benefit) they smother her. Meanwhile her drug-addicted brother fights, steals, and otherwise slides into criminal oblivion, a situation his parents ignore. Caught in this confusing and unpleasant life, teenage Saffron remembers herself as Emer, killing those around her in inventively violent ways while planning her escape to recover the treasure she hid in the sands of Jamaica centuries earlier.

Linking the two are brief interludes, titled "Dog Facts", in which the lives of a few of the dogs that Saffron remembers living are used as case studies for how to raise dogs. Of course, the dog facts are mostly metaphors for Saffron's current life, illustrating how her parents emotionally abuse her and her brother, just as dog owners emotionally abuse their pets. And this raises the interesting question of the novel - is Saffron actually Emer reincarnated after living the lives of one hundred dogs? Or is she merely imagining that she was a vicious pirate in a previous life in order to escape her current life? Though the events of the story seem to confirm that Saffron is indeed the reincarnation of Emer, there is enough ambiguity that she might just be fantasizing. And what teenager who felt miserable and alone has not imagined horrible deaths for those who torment them, or imagined a more colorful past for themselves? And in this way A.S. King ties the story to the lives of teenagers and draws the reader into the story. Because despite apparently having lived the lives of a Irish pirate and a hundred canines, Saffron is in many ways very much a typical misunderstood teenager who is both highly intelligent and weighted down by expectations.

Eventually, Saffron does what Emer could not, and negotiates a peace with those around her and is finally able to break free of her oppressive family. But she must also break free of Emer's past, and that requires she confront Fred Livingston, a creepy island inhabitant who apparently has lain in wait for her since the fateful day of Emer's death. And in describing Fred Livingstone's virulent personality and behavior, A.S. King exposes the ugly side of humanity, far worse than anything Emer had ever done despite her piratical ways. But Saffron figures out how to do what Emer could not, and breaks what could have become a vicious cycle of repetition to set herself free of her past.

In The Dust of 100 Dogs A.S. King has crafted a coming of age story that captures all of the hurt and pain and anger inherent in growing up and finding your own place in the world. Though it seems to tell two stories, Dust really tells one: to move to the future, you have to shed the demons of your past or they will drag you back to where you were before. Emer's past consumes her, while Saffron, with the perspective of a hundred lives behind her, is able to defy her past and see a hopeful future. Although it seems odd at first glance, mixing the story of an Irish pirate, a dirt poor Pennsylvania girl, and a collection of facts gleaned from the lives of dogs results in a compelling tale that examines abuse, neglect, and the struggles of a bright child saddled with poverty and the burden of stifling parental expectations. Just as Emer flays the skin off her enemies, A.S. King peels back the layers to expose the raw core at the heart of adolescence and delivers a fantastic book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

What can I say about this book? I really do not know how I feel about the book I've just completed, and might not know until I reread it a couple of times in years to come. All I know entirely for sure is that my author-crush on A.S. King has gotten larger, and that I have never in my life encountered a book remotely like The Dust of 100 Dogs.

I've read two other novels by A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants and Ask the Passengers. As much as they differed from one another, The Dust of 100 Dogs is even further removed. Her other novels are contemporaries, but this one takes place in the seventeenth century and the 1990s. Her storytelling methods, the mature subject matter, and the settings highlight King's daring as an author.

Her love of show more history can also be felt in Everybody Sees the Ants, in which the main character's grandfather was a World War II veteran. Here, King goes all the way back to seventeeth century Ireland, in the era of Oliver Cromwell and English subjugation (well, one of many eras of that anyway). She unflinchingly depicts the brutality of the English through the eyes of eight-year-old Emer, who witnesses her mother's brave battle and her brother's death firsthand. Where she was once a weak, whiny creature with dreams of being admired for her beauty, Emer learns from this hard lessons about power and how to live.

Taken in by her abusive Uncle and his family, she loses herself in her grief for a while, retreating into herself and going mute by choice, since there is nothing worth talking about in her new life. This changes when she meets the love of her life, a boy similarly mute, Seanie Carroll. When she takes a stand against her cruel Uncle Martin, he ships her off to France to marry a wealthy, disgusting old man. Emer escapes and begins her wanderings around the world, eventually becoming the captain of a pirate vessel.

That's right! Thar be pirates here! These are the kinds of pirates one cannot help but root for, coming across almost as Robin Hoods, when compared to the slavers and the plundering Spanish. Emer, an honest, upright girl at heart, justifies her actions, her violence, with the knowledge that these colonizers do horrible things to the people whose land they are stealing. The comparisons drawn between the English in Ireland, the Spanish on the Atlantic Isles, and the manifest destiny of the Americans are brilliant.

King focuses on power and on colonization. Her tale is not a happy one. Lovers die, heroines are raped and stalked by the worst of men, and many people are held subjective to the whims of assholes with more will and more power. Even in Emer's modern life (as Saffron), this plays out through the abuses of her brother, a druggie, who steals and destroys everything her parents have, but whom they cannot begin to resist; they are willing victims. Emer, after her childhood experience, never allows anyone to make her into an easy victim; her suffering makes her strong.

The concept and execution completely awe me. King tells the story through shifting perspectives: Emer in third person, Saffron in first person, Fred Livingstone in third person, and notes about dogs. Emer's third person narration, with the exception of the prologue, follows her life chronologically. Saffron, blessed or cursed with Emer's memories still has her own distinct personality. She is a fascinating figure, a child with hundreds of years of memories, both human and hound. Fred may be one of the most creepy characters I have ever encountered, and I do not think I'll be forgetting him any time soon; he's like a rapist stalker combined with Gollum, which is just nightmarish. The notes about life as a dog and how best to raise them are typically King in their oddness. These include sharp insights into human nature, but do occasionally come across as a message from the humane society.

Much as I love the plot of this book and am wowed by King's bravery as an author to venture into such untrespassed lands of YA fiction, I do wish there had been more focus on characterization. My first priority for a book is characters I really connect with, and I did not really find that in Emer or Saffron. I like both of them, worry about both of them, and wish the best for both of them, but they did not capture my heart. With all that King had to accomplish narratively, this is not surprising, because the book would have had to be a good bit longer. If you do not read for character foremost, as I do, then this will likely not be a huge drawback.

If you are looking for a book unlike anything else in YA fiction, you cannot go wrong with A.S. King's The Dust of 100 Dogs. King writes beautifully and does not romanticize anything. Her books are honest and thought-provoking. show less

Saffron is wise beyond her years, but not in the way that adults think when they say that: the ability to appear really serious, the ability to handle "mature situations," and the cunning to look young and sweet while you do it. Saffron has all that, but she also has memories dating back to the 1600s when she, then Emer, was a pirate captain whose trademark was popping out Spanish eyeballs. Back then she was cursed with the Dust of 100 Dogs to be reincarnated 101 times and to keep her memories from each life. The 1st 100 reincarnations she was a dog (as you may have guessed from the name of the curse/book). Now, in her 102 life, she can finally enjoy human existence again, if you can call living in Hollow Ford, PA in the swingin' 70s a show more "human existence." Finally escaped from life on 4 legs, Saffron (Emer) just needs to escape low income suburbia so she can reclaim what's hers. Buried treasure, of course. Somewhere in the Caribbean.

The whole book, which alternates between Emer's life from childhood to when she is cursed and Saffron's life in Hollow Ford and treasure hunting, is peppered with Dog Tips. These tips give little glimpses into the lives of dogs raised to be in dog fights, strays, the spoiled little dogs that get carried around in purses, and the times in history in which Saffron lived these lives.

The historical parts of this novel are well-researched, and it shows. Emer's life in Ireland is richly described and detailed, as is her life in the Caribbean. This book does not, however, read like historical fiction. It is not bogged down with description (not that historical fiction must be); little details are dropped into the narrative in a way that doesn't distract from the story, which remains high action no matter what time period it is portraying. The only time period that fell a little short for me was Saffron's current life. It felt a little too present day to be the 70s. The only way I could tell that Saffron wasn't in Hollow Ford yesterday is that no one had a cell phone, but when you're talking about really poor people who are robbed on a general basis by a tweaker family member, the lack of cell phones could still be current. This didn't detract from the story AT ALL for me. I simply forgot when Saffron was supposed to be.

The Dust of 100 Dogs was a really unique book and a really fun read. I think it will be a hit with the millions of readers of paranormal romance out there, even though it's not really a romance and it's not really paranormal, even though the main character has been reincarnated 101 times.I look forward to seeing what A.S. King will come up with for young adults in the future. show less

It was the 1700s, and Emer Morrisey was on the brink of escaping her pirate life with Seanie, her first and true love. But before she could, her archenemy cursed her to live the lives of 100 dogs before being reborn again as a human. It was now the 21st century, and Emer is finally reborn as Saffron. Born with her memories intact, she is the genius of the family and is their hope for the future. However, she has other plans in mind: to turn 18 and sail off to Jamaica to retrieve the treasure she has left behind.

This book is very witty indeed. It successfully blends the historical and the contemporary, and presents a main character who is lovable and funny even though she is quite a bit neurotic at times. Saffron/Emer has this habit of show more trying to dismember, kill, or do other torturous stuff to people whenever she gets cross or annoyed with them. This is so funny that I can't help laughing! A.S. King has managed to capture the teenage female psyche - lost, rebellious, and well, bratty at times. She has also given us a powerful dose of girl power here. From what we know, most notorious pirates were boys but hey, here comes a girl pirate! Awesome.

At the start of the book, you get the impression that Saffron was just a typical girl. But as you read through the pages, you find out [as I did] that she is very misunderstood and what brought her to her current life was a very, very tumultuous past. From a very young age, she has been through a lot and has been forced to grow up and just be the way she is. I'm sure if anyone of us had that type of experience, we would also be forced to grow up too. Saffron/Emer has a very strong personality that many of us aspire to have.

I loved the historical elements of the book. They were presented in a manner that intrigues and drives you to google. I googled them and yes, they are historically accurate. The chapters dividing the book were also mixed wonderfully where the contemporary is in one chapter, and a historical/flashback aspect the next, without confusing the reader.

This is a must read. I would never have picked up this book if it wasn't recommended to me and I'm more than happy that it was recommended. A friend of mine who I loaned the book to was asking if this was going be the next movie blockbuster. I just hope it will be, as the concept of the book was utterly awesome.

Published: 2009
Publisher: Flux
Available from: Amazon and perhaps your local booksellers
Read it if: You want something new and exciting!! Very, very good book
Book was acquired from: A.S. King [many many thanks for signing the book + for the other books too]. This was part of Lenore's International Book Bloggers Mentoring Program.
fickle fan/overall rating:
LOVES show less

Cromwell's New Model Army attempts to eradicate the Irish in 1649, and young Emer sees atrocities. She's then taken to Connaught with her uncle's family where she slowly starves for years, before being sold off at 14 to a wealthy "husband". She sets sail for the Caribbean and gradually, by degrees over years, becomes a pirate.

And also, at her death, she's cursed with the dust of a hundred dogs to be reincarnated as a dog one hundred times.

And after that she is reincarnated as a human in contemporary Pennsylvania, the youngest of five children, early identified as a genius and the hope of a family sliding into destitution.

It's an odd story, but the pieces fit together beautifully. The memory of what Emer endured, and the violence she show more perfected, gives the modern Saffron extra reserves to call upon, as well as a clear view of the world. Her brother is an addict who will steal and sell anything to feed his habit. It's no good angsting about it, just hide anything important and carry on.

Good choice for anyone who suffers from stabbiness in the presence of others.

Library copy. show less