Dog Years

Reviews / Votes

The nine stories in this promising collection explore the shifting concepts of health and wellness in the modern world, in the drab laboratories of disease researchers, sanitized operating rooms, and the picturesque mountains of Davos, Switzerland. The title story poignantly explores the minutiae of raising a terminally ill child, examining how illness can seep into even the smallest moments. In Firstborn," a Francophile accidentally invites the wrong niece on a much-needed vacation to Paris, only for the niece to abscond the night before the trip. An advocate for injured veterans wrestles with her affections for a general (a man with "no face") in "Hounds." A disgraced businesswoman enrolls in a cheap (and bizarrely effective) self-help regimen in "The Program?." Yancy deftly navigates the rarely seen backstage of the betterment industry, lightening the often heavy subject matter with welcome injections of irony and humor. The collection's cumulative effect is heartening and lasting. * <i>Publishers Weekly</i> * Yancy's strength lies in her ability to so thoroughly inhabit her characters that we come to know them better than we may know ourselves. Moments of interiority reveal truths, and they dig deep, allowing us to the see the people beneath their veneers. In just a sentence or two, a story can get at the heart of a character. * <i>Ploughshares</i> * Yancy breaks through her characters' surfaces of isolation and pretense to explore the uncharted yet universal depths of human emotion. Opening with the title story, a vignette about a couple, both geneticists, grappling with their son's muscular dystrophy in the midst of their own professional research on the subject, the author focuses on subjects that walk a fascinating line between deeply private struggle and performative interactions with the outside world. Her characters are wrapped up in their own lives, defined in some way by a significant but not all-encompassing facet of themselves until they are shaken from their complacency. . . . All these stories, many of which center on the medical industry, are meticulously wrapped up in layers of interiority, awareness of the outside gaze, and what it means to straddle the public and the private. The author's characters are deeply flawed but not irredeemable; they are delightfully and infuriatingly human, sympathetic without invoking pity, and complex without being inscrutable. Subtle but powerful, this collection is a moving portrait of what it means to be seen and to see ourselves. * <i>Kirkus Reviews</i> * Melissa Yancy's debut collection, Dog Years, is excellent. Normally I would give examples of Yancy's finely tuned writing, maybe a passage of description or subtle dialogue, but the collection is so consistently excellent that it's hard to choose. . . . Yancy seems to be an artist who sees everything clearly, and who can make us see, and feel, alongside her. I look forward to reading more of her work. * Colorado Review * Melissa Yancy is a brilliant writer. In Dog Years she extracts from modern medicine a metaphoric language to describe the triumphs and disappointments of daily life with enormous empathy. * Anthony Marra * A collection you end up feeling a serious admiration for, moved by Yancy's stubborn audacity to reveal her characters so nakedly and, more broadly, at her incredibly sharp eye. * <i>The Brooklyn Rail</i> * Melissa Yancy's stories make me swoon with recognition. They're funny and sad in the same breath; they're incredibly well executed; they're about the endlessly fascinating machinery of relationships, about the weird intersections of medical technology and human dignity, and about the ways time catches up with everyone in the end. I've been waiting a long time for her stories to be collected in a book; Dog Years is cause for celebration. * Anthony Doerr * Rich, smart, and humorously moving . . . Astonishing in the emotional range embodied in its characters . . . these realist stories, told largely in the third person, often read as nuanced portraits. Perhaps what's most arresting about 'Dog Years' is Yancy's ability to create the quiet within each character-the moments of hesitation, of disappointment, of silent resolve-with such beautiful, understated exactness. Yancy excels at creating vulnerability in her characters and depicting it with compassion, while serving it to readers with sometimes a wryness or familiar nod. * <i>Waxwing Literary Journal</i> * The smart, intricate, carefully crafted stories in Dog Years reminded me of Lauren Groff's Delicate, Edible Birds for both their ambition and extraordinary beauty. * Richard Russo, judge * The stories of Dog Years deftly explore illness, aging, dying, and the fight we rage against the inevitable. There is beauty in all of these things, a kind of human gloaming, as after the sun sets comes sublime light. Yancy finds and uses this light masterfully again and again in every one of these deeply human, deeply affecting stories. * Marie-Helene Bertino *