Book Review: Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard

 

What is it with those heartfelt animal non-fictions that usually just gets me? I don't know. My love for animals, I suppose. Anyways, let's dive in.

Seasoned ultramarathon runner Dion Leonard partakes in a huge race through the Gobi Desert. During the race he ends up befriending a friendly stray dog, whom he names Gobi. After the race is over he wants to take the dog home from China and keep her as a pet, but that proves to be a very difficult challenge. Especially once he goes back home to the United Kingdom while Gobi, being temporarily looked after by someone else in China before she can make the flight to the UK, manages to escape.

This true story was a very heartwarming one. I do like reading the occasional non-fiction book based on an individual animal rather than a species as a whole. And Finding Gobi does not disappoint. The book is split into several parts. We start out with Dion and the race, where he first meets Gobi. Then the struggle to manage to find a way for her to get to the UK. Then the huge search for this runaway dog in Ürümqi after she runs away.

Luckily, Gobi is found after a long and exhausting search and happily re-united with Leonard, but there's still the difficult journey of getting her to the United Kingdom with all the required medical checks. Also, suspicious characters start showing up at Leonard's doorstep during his stay in China, trying to silence him or possibly steal the dog. We never find out just exactly what they're up to, but it's all very sketchy and I'm super happy to see that, after all this time, Gobi finally got to go to her forever home with Leonard in the UK.

It's a heartfelt story that got really exciting and suspicious in some places, with high highs and low lows. We also get several glimpses into Leonard's relationships with his family and his past. I didn't find the flashbacks to be all that jarring, but I personally would've liked to have gotten the backstory context first and gotten to Gobi's story later so it's all chronological. Now it somewhat randomly skips between the search for Gobi and Leonard's backstory and it feels a slight bit disjointed sometimes.

But overall this is a story that's very easy to get through. You'll laugh, you'll cry. It's got all the good stuff. This isn't my favorite animal non-fiction I've ever read, but still pretty damn good.

Rating: 3.5/5