Book Review: Tails from the Booth (amazingly expressive dog photos)

Tails From the Booth, by Lynn Terry* (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, 2015, 128 pages, $17.99)

Remember when you were a kid in junior high or a bigger kid in high school and would go downtown to take pictures in a quick-photo booth with your best friend or your new significant other. If the former, the photos would be silly, the sillier the better: if the latter, you may be smooching.

When you first thumb through Tails From the Booth, you will stop on the pages with photos of ‘your dog’ or your dog’s breed or puppies or dogs that look like your All-American dog. Then you will go through slowly, page by page, reading the few pages with words of explanation and really appreciating each page, each photo.

Who Could Believe Dogs Can Be So Expressive?

These delightful dog photos are all the same as well as all different: some are silly and others, smoochy. With every expression in between.

The backdrops are generally red or blue curtains (like in photo booths) but sometimes the backdrops and photos themselves are sepia-toned.

Some pages feature only a single dog but most have a photo strip of four photos with two or three dogs goofing off. Where there are three dogs, one may be ‘littler’ and find himself squished in the middle peeking out. Other photo pages have both dogs mirroring each other – each looking right in one photo, left in the second, up, then down; tongues out, or more serious, or merely smiling at you, or laughing. Other photos tell a story in four pictures.

Coffee Table Book

Tails is a book to ‘read’ to your grandchild right before lights-out or when settling down for a nap (both of you!). Kids will have their favorite photos.

Props?

Props are few and far between – collars and tennis balls, but the only props really needed are the dogs themselves.

Chapters and. . .Notecards!

My Tale of the Booth, Going Viral, Rescuing Deedee, A Day in the Life, Man’s (and Woman’s) Best Friend (starring each named star in the book). . .and best yet, you can also purchase a dozen notecards (like I did!).

Dedication

It seems only book reviewers read the Acknowledgments or the Forward so let me direct you to this Dedication: “This book is dedicated. . . to. . . our cute little pup of a daughter, Adelaide, without whom this book would have been completed so very much sooner.”

Test Questions

There is one cat in this book: can you find it? And what do you think the final page should look like?

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Caveat: This book was purchased for review.

* On FaceBook – Lynn Terry Photography – and on Instagram