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Almost Perfect on January 29, 2014 Length: 9 hours 7 minutes
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Two unlikely friends, an old woman and a boy with special needs, take an aging champion to Westminster Dog Show, and heal their troubled families.
Seventy year-old Bess Rutledge has fantasized about winning the Westminster Dog Show all her life, but now she has decided she is too old to follow her dream. She meets Benny, an angry fourteen year-old with mild autism and ADHD, who has a dream of his own: to impress his self-absorbed mother. He becomes convinced that winning Westminster with McCreery, Bess’ aging champion standard poodle, will finally make his mother proud of him. Getting Bess to go along with his plan, however, is not going to be so easy.
Almost Perfect by Diane Daniels Manning is a story that reaches right in to your heart and settles there. Bess is in her 70s and has spent a lifetime showing and breeding championship dogs. She has finally decided to sell everything and retire when her champion stud is stolen. Benny, a neighbor boy, who happens to be mildly autistic, has fallen hard for McCreery, and is very upset when he finds out the dog has been taken.
Bess and Benny form an alliance that at first seems like it won’t work, but it turns out to be an amazing partnership. They both see something in each other that other people don’t see. Working together, they decide to work toward the Westminster Dog Show.
I was interested by this story. I easily became invested in Bess, Benny and McCreery right away and wanted to know where the story would take them. Bess and Benny’s friendship was endearing. It was interesting to learn about the Westminster Dog Show (which takes place February 16-17 this year). It is something that I hadn’t known much about before listening to this book. I liked that both Bess and Benny were flawed in their own ways but didn’t let it limit them from doing what they wanted to do.
The audiobook narration was fair. There were times when I wasn’t totally sure who was speaking. Overall, the narrator did a decent job with telling the story. There were a lot of characters and at times the story felt like it was going back and forth between a few different story lines. I had to re-listen to a few parts to make sure I knew what was going on. The book did hold my attention and it was one that I wanted to see through to the end.
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I want to win because this sounds like such a heart warming story…makes me sad that this boy needs to impress his mom though 🙁
Because it sounds like a book that will touch the heart.