Dog Days, Glenn Miller Nights
by Laurie Graham
Nomination: Women's Prize Longlist 2001
Date Read: June 4, 2022
I think the wrong cover got put on this novel. Having not read the blurb before picking this one up, I thought it would be about a hard-working young nobody by day and a notable ballroom dancer by night. Instead, this is about curmudgeonly elderly woman who lives in sketchy subsidized housing. Completely different than I had anticipated.
That being said, Birdie is funny in her persnickety personality and cantankerous observations. Her age is in contrast to the youth she sees and she doesn’t understand how the world has taken the direction it has (e.g. droopy pants, drugs, young people in general, etc.). Birdie’s friends are her neighbors and although she complains about everyone, she has a heart of gold.
Her ex-husband keeps leaving dogs with Birdie and she reluctantly nurtures them until her ex appears again and whisks them away. She always misses them when they’re gone. She shops for her neighbors who are too elderly to do for themselves and takes care of the neighbor boy when his Mom gets married.
Swirling around this lovable woman, however, is a seedy environment where people are robbed, gardens vandalized and the occupants terrorized in general by the local thugs. These tensions brew until the denouement where a little girl getting injured and the police response incites a riot at the buildings. A police officer is killed in the mayhem but who tried to save him? That’s right.
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