Note: The title of this book and series have been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers. The original title reads Ziemlich Beste Pfoten. The book is currently not available in English (yet).
I don't read that many non-fictions that focus on particular animals, usually I just read the informative books about the species as a whole instead. But let's see how this one holds up!
Also, the title is translated a little clunky into English since it's a wordplay in German. I went with "Quite Best Paws" as a play on "Quite Best Pals", since the German wordplay is done similarly but just works better in said language.
The author meets his new love of his life, however there is one aspect he's less fond of: her pet dog Bonny. To make things worse, Bonny one day goes missing during a trip to Spain, and Yiannopoulos' wife is devastated. Much to their surprise, Bonny sometime later shows up in Spain again, just in a completely different location many kilometers away from where she got lost (with an entire sea in between). And this time she's not alone: she's befriended another stray, whom the author and his wife take in and name Pippa.
From here on Yiannopoulos tries to learn how to understand dogs better, and also goes on a quest to figure out how exactly Bonny and Pippa ended up in a completely different location thousands of kilometers away from where Bonny was lost. He meets many people who have met Bonny and Pippa on their journey, who all tell their tales.
This was honestly just a pretty feel-good read. Do I believe every instance of people's experiences with these dogs? Eh, maybe? I mean, it's all secondhand accounts, there's really no proof of people having met Bonny and Pippa before other than people (supposedly) recognizing them and one of the people wearing a shirt with the dogs on it (before they met up with the author).
But the tales the people tell are usually pretty wholesome and they do show the bond most of these people developed with the dogs. Some of them even claim to have pretty much owned them in the time Bonny was missing. There's also some people who are not fond of the dogs, but overall the interactions and meaningful bonds the dogs had with these people they met were pretty sweet to read about, even if I'm not 100% positive I believe all of them.
Honestly, the only downside to this book for me was how downright kind of mean the author was early on in the book. I get that not everyone likes dogs (or animal in general), and that's valid. You don't have to like every animal, but you should at least respect it.
But Yiannopoulos just acts so insensitive around his (obviously very upset) wife after Bonny goes missing, eventually trying to simply "replace" the dog with a new one. Look, I get that he doesn't like dogs and probably doesn't understand very well how much Bonny meant to his wife, but you have to be really daft to just think that buying your grieving wife a new dog will just solve everything like Bonny never even existed.
Granted, he does get better after Bonny and Pippa come back. He slowly grows more attached to the dogs and starts to actively make an effort to get to know them and to learn about the species. At first I thought he was just doing this for his book-project (figuring out how exactly Bonny and Pippa traveled all those kilometers and even made it from Gran Canaria to mainland Spain), but he does eventually get better and maybe even becomes a dog person at the end. Or at least a light variant of a dog person.
And that development is good and again pretty wholesome, but it was really hard to like the author in the early chapters where he saw Bonny more as a burden he had to put up with than anything and was pretty insensitive towards his wife because of her love for the dog.
The book overall was a decent read and pretty wholesome. You just have to get through some pretty cringe-worthy instances of the author being insensitive in the early chapters. But I am happy that he eventually made the effort to learn about dogs and get to know Bonny and Pippa rather than just begrudgingly putting up with them.
Rating: 3.5/5
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