If you love animal books, particularly those about dogs, you’ll probably love ROAM by Alan Lazar. A curious dog roams too far from his “Great Love” (master) and just keeps roaming, encountering many different types of people along the way, always remembering his Great Love. It’s a darling story, and people who love animals usually are suckers for darling animal stories. I’m one of those people.

So I loved the story. But I didn’t like the children’s storybook feel to it. It even has a storybook ending.

How could it be any other way, though? The story is told from the dog’s perspective just as was another book before it, THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by Garth Stein. That book, too, sounds like a storybook.

Since I was 8 years old I haven’t liked books that sounded like storybooks. But that’s just me. THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN was and still is popular with many other people, and ROAM should be for the same reasons.

So ROAM gets four stars for the suckers for animal books.