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Lady: My Life as a Bitch, by Melvin Burgess If you gotta be a dog, be a bitch.  Here’s a clever little story about a teen-aged girl, Sandra, who crosses the wrong path and gets turned into a dog. It’s for young adult readers, especially girls, who will sympathize with Sandra and all the angst and drama of her family and her social life.
Sandra, at seventeen, has already developed an impressive sexual history and an adult attitude toward sex in general. She likes it and she isn’t ashamed. I wondered if this is a reflection of a difference between American and British culture (the book is set in Manchester) or if it’s indicative of society’s less conservative values since I was a teen-ager. I remember the Judy Blume books I read as an adolescent treated sex and menstruation as tense, dramatic issues and the main focus of the story. Here, Sandra’s sex life is mentioned almost as an afterthought and certainly not her primary conflict.
Some readers might choose to view Sandra’s being turned into a dog as literary justice, a punishment for her promiscuity. I don’t believe that was the author’s intention at all. For one thing, Sandra’s life as a dog winds up being a pretty good one and she ultimately decides that, while she’ll miss her family and friends, she actually prefers the carefree dog’s life after all. On the contrary, the lesson learned by the girl seems to be: having sex whenever you want, with anybody you want, is the best way to live and our human restrictions on such things prevents us from enjoying life the way we might if we were more like dogs.
The dramatic issues: mother-daughter relationships, divorce, sibling rivalry, etc. receive full attention in this story, and they are handled in a sensitive, even touching, manner. As a divorced parent, I cringed when Sandra described her parents’ divorce and the way she felt torn in the middle.
Since it is a book for kids, I was a bit surprised by the rather graphic description of what it feels like to be a bitch dog in heat being mounted and then stuck together with another dog. But really, who wouldn’t want to imagine what that feels like?
Lady : My Life as a Bitch, by Melvin Burgess
HarperTempest, 272pgs
ISBN: 0060540338
Review by Tess
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