Dog Days receives a starred review in Booklist!

Gendry-Kim’s fourth extraordinary title arrives, once again translated by notable Korean Canadian Hong, this time tugging, stressing, nearly breaking the heartstrings of pet lovers. Gendry-Kim’s signature black-and-white panels are noticeably darker than light, a foreboding looming throughout. At the Love Pet Shop, a couple purchases a Welsh corgi puppy they name Carrot. Besides a single biting incident, Carrot is the perfect companion to the book’s narrator—Gendry-Kim’s stand-in—who works from home: “How did we ever live without you?” The couple move from Seoul “to the countryside near the ocean,” and Carrot gets a sibling—Potato—when a puppy appears in a box at their door. Out on their regular walks, the other dogs are most noticeable—tied up, trapped, alone. They can’t ignore a traumatized border collie, and Choco joins the growing brood. Most utterly devastating is discovering their seemingly kind neighbor is a dog butcher. “I published Dog Days as a deliberate act of resistance,” Gendry-Kim writes in her essential afterword. One of the most significant city-to-village differences, she reports, is the treatment of pets—city dogs are beloved, integral family members; their country counterparts are more likely to be abused, abandoned, killed. She hopes “this book would encourage people to notice and pay attention, even just a little, to the dogs around them. I dreamed of changing the world.”