Any loss is terribly sad but the loss of a companion animal is one of the toughest, especially for a family.

When he took his aging cat to see the doctor for one last visit, Larry Levin thought he would be nursing an empty, feline-sized hole for quite a while. Upon his entry into the doctor’s waiting room, that day, however, he had another think coming. He and his twin, teen boys were greeted, on arrival, by the ugliest, cutest, most energetic, ball of white fuzz anyone of the three had ever encountered. According to Levin and the boys, it was love at first sight on all accounts. Part they could not.

And so began the story of The Levins and Oogy The Former Bait Dog.

I have to tell you something.

I made a huge mistake in reading Oogy.

That’s not really fair or even terribly true; I just made a huge mistake in reading Oogy after finishing Lost Dogs.

Simply put, Oogy was a cute, heart-warming fuzz ball of a story about a family that adopted a scraggly puppy.

Alright, that’s an over simplification, just like saying that Lost Dogs was just a book about the fall-out of a football player’s dog fighting ring. It’s basically that I had been through the first read and its brutal shadows, torturous trial scenes, rallying communities and, generally speaking, giant network-like feel of a story.

Gorant’s dogs were cool, hip, jaded college professors who had been around the world and back; Oogy was just a little kid that had been at the wrong end of the wrong playground at the wrong time.

I was craving another good pittie story and I was coming off of my Vick-tory lap from a heavier account. Falling into Oogy, without having the more monstrous, serious offense of the Moonlight story, I might have fallen in love.

My personal issues aside, Oogy is a dog lover’s book, through and through. Of course, it can be read as a plain-old, people lover’s book, too. Levin writes with such a warmth and care for his family and friends that it can be, at once, an ode to the puppy and to the people he lives with. As far as the pit-preference needed to read it, the levels are relatively low. The dog was used as bait for a month or two but then graduated to fight more medical and aesthetic hangups than BSLs.

Overall, it’s a book for the every-dog but will strike a special something for anyone who has ever welcomed a rescue dog into his or her home. And, again, if you need a little bit more meat on your rescue story, I do recommend Jim Gorant’s The Lost Dogs. ;O)