Feature: This Is Your Fault, Fourth Grade

August is National Dog Month, and we are getting a head start this week!

If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you know exactly what kind of dog people we are. Someone handed you Where the Red Fern Grows in fourth grade and said good luck. You watched All Dogs Go to Heaven at a sleepover and spent the next three days thinking about mortality. You read The Incredible Journey and held your breath for 300 pages of Canadian wilderness while a bull terrier, a Labrador, and a Siamese cat tried to get home. You sat in a movie theater watching Homeward Bound and completely fell apart when Shadow came over the hill. You read Island of the Blue Dolphins and met Karana and Rontu and thought it was one of the most beautiful things you had ever read, and you were right, and the story of how that book came to exist is more complicated than anyone told you at the time.

Dog stories shaped us. They were often the first stories we read where something real was at stake, where loss was possible, where love did not guarantee a good outcome. They were doing serious emotional work on us and we had no idea.

And apparently it stuck. Millennials are now the largest pet-owning generation in the country, representing about a third of all pet owners. Around 76% of us consider our pets our children. We spend more on premium food, veterinary care, and pet insurance than any generation before us (just ask our bank accounts…). We did not get here by accident. We got here because someone turned on Old Yeller when we were nine.

This week on BookCrushin we are leaning into all of it. We have new releases, author interviews, and our own dogs’ theoretical career paths. We are also spending some time here with the classics, the ones that started this whole problem.

Welcome to the week of the dog!