It's quite a task trying to train "ninety pounds of adult dog who already has opinions and his own life-style worked out", says Diane Branningan, the hardheaded, wisecracking, totally engaging narrator of the the german shepard. Finding him in the first place is as easy as finding snow in the Sahara, when he has to have the size, beauty, presence, and substance required to play the hero in a movie remake of the Call of the Wild, and the search for the right dog is an adventure in itself, not only for Diane, but for her lover, Luke, a disillusioned writer and her partner, Sam, a dog trainer who doesn't own a dog. Once they find Jouster, Diane gives herself to the task with ferocious love, knowledge, anmd confidence, but even she couldn't predict Jouster's intelligence courage, and will. Jouster givers her and everyone else everything he has to give, but like Huckleberry Finn and other heros of American tradition, he doesn't always look so heroic and indeed is hard to tell from a crazed criminal dog from time to time. Even Diane doubts him, deciding that he is "trash", leaving Jouster virtually alone to prove what Diane's phrase "a real dog" means. Jouster's insistence on his greatness finally shakes up everyone in this superbly original first novel. Sam finds that he can no longer keep is love life convenietly off the kennel grounds, Luke that his caution and disillusion are no way to live a life, Jack Kaye, the grand old man of Hollywood dog training, that it's time to crawl out of the bottle. The entire county finds out how the testimony of a dog can discover truth, and Diane, for all her passion and commitment, has lessons to learn about what full engagement in life can be.