Book Review: Gully's Travels (dog, Upper East Side New York, France, children, rowdiness, love and loyalty)

Gully’s Travels, by Tor Seidler (Scholastic, 2008, 192 pages, $16.95, grades 3-4, ages 8 and up)

Every once in a while, DogEvals reviews a book that we unanimously hope turns into a movie. Gully’s Travels is one such book. And, if we didn’t know better, we would have thought it was a book for adults, not elementary schoolers.

The Setting

The book is not what it appears to be. The adorable mutt on the cover is also not what he appears to be. He is more than that. First of all, he is not a mutt.

Pure-bred Lhasa Apso Gulliver dines on only the finest premium gourmet canned dog food and appreciates the better things in life: regular grooming, short walks, peace and quiet. He has his own French Lit professor who lives in an Upper East Side Manhattan high-rise. Gulliver and his professor befriend another professor and his pure-bred, Schnauzer Rodney, who also eats sirloin rather than Kibbles and Bits.

Our professor takes his dog to France every July where Gulliver falls in love with Chloe, a French Maltese.

The Plot Thickens

But then, Gulliver’s professor also falls in love – with a French ‘femme’ who is allergic to dogs.

So, Gulliver must go - to live with the Manhattan apartment’s doorman in Queens and his rowdy family of mutts and kids and noise and fun (fun?). How Gully manages to find his way back to his Manhattan apartment not once but twice is almost unbelievable but he arrives a smelly stray.

And that is only the beginning of Gully’s thoroughly believable but coincidental adventures. The reluctant adventures of a dog on his way to understanding what life is all about and who really matters – and canine loyalty.

Writing Style

Author Tor Seidler tells us vividly about high-end living in New York City and also of its

snooty inhabitants. Seidler then goes on to relate the utter chaos of an immigrant family with French neighbors in Queens, far from the Upper East Side in every imaginable way.

And the ending, though surprisingly unsurprising, is simply the best for a young budding actor and a born-again Lhasa!

We would love to see Gully’s Travels as a movie (like another of Seidler’s books, A Rat’s Tale, a Warner Brothers puppet tale) – or at least a cartoon!