The Eyes and the Impossible

Johannes is a dog who runs free through a park beside the sea, so fast that the humans who visit the park barely register him as he passes, and he serves as the Eyes for a council of three elderly bison, Freya, Meredith, and Samuel, who have lived in the park's fenced meadow so long that they can no longer see much of it themselves and rely on Johannes's daily reports to know whether the park is in balance. Johannes runs with a loose crew of animal friends, a pelican, a squirrel, a seagull, and a raccoon among them, and his reporting takes on new urgency when he discovers strange humanmade structures inside the park carrying images he does not understand, a discovery that eventually leads to his own capture by park workers he calls the Troubled Travelers. His animal friends organize to free him, and the book follows that rescue along with Johannes's growing sense that the park's old order, the fences, the bison's stillness, the rules about what an animal is and is not allowed to do, may not deserve the unquestioning loyalty he has always given it.

Eggers writes almost entirely from inside Johannes's headlong, joyful, philosophically restless voice, and the prose runs fast and breathless in a way that mimics a dog's own untiring energy, mixing real sophistication of language with real simplicity of feeling. It suits readers who enjoy an animal narrator asking genuinely large questions about freedom and captivity without the book ever slowing down to lecture, and Shawn Harris's illustrations move with the same propulsive energy as the text itself.