Janice Gary takes the reader on her journey of healing from a past sexual assault that left her fearful and immobilized. Barney, her black Lab, leads the way as they take walks in a public park and ends up being her trusty companion and mentor.

If you love dogs and have a pet, you will love this book. If you don’t, you will see the joy dogs bring to their human’s life. It is through these walks with Barney that Janice finds the courage to face her fears about what happened in the past and find the strength and inner peace she needs to move on in her life.

It is also a tribute to the strong bond that can be forged between a dog and a human.

Her words pulled me in through her raw honesty, vivid sensory detail and lyrical writing. I felt the pain of her past, the fear she faced in the moment and the joy of her eventual healing and freedom from fear.

It is a beautifully written memoir of courage, hope and healing that will stay with me for a long time. ( )

As someone who has a reactive dog, I was excited to read this book about Janice Gary's own experiences with walking her own reactive dog. From the beginning, I have been disappointed in this book. While the writing style is fine--nothing to brag about, but not glaringly awful--the story constantly angers me. While Gary's experience with her dog may have helped her deal with past trauma, from the beginning she does nothing to help her dog deal with his trauma. She is constantly lost in her own world of fear, rather than doing anything on their walks to help her dog with his anxiety. She takes no responsibility for the actions of her dog--instead, just keeps him locked inside or on short walks in deserted areas since she can't take him out in their neighborhood anymore. It angers me to see how Gary's actions affect her dog. If I had been looking for a book just about human healing, this might have been the right book, but I thought this book would be about the way helping her dog helped Gary heal. Instead, it's just about Gary and her trauma with a few mentions of a dog sniffing the ground alongside her. ( )

Janice Gary always loved dogs. The day she found Barney a Lab/Rottweiler mix running loose in the road she was not in a good place in her life. She had moved from near Washington DC to rural Georgia, following her husband as he got a new job.

She had left behind a support group she liked for adult children of alcoholics (ACOA), didn't have a job herself, and had no friends. She didn't know it, but Barney would become a big part of her life.

When Janice was just 20 years old, she left home and moved to San Francisco to become a musician. She didn't know anyone, the days of free love had ended, and where she ended up in Berkeley was not such a great place.

One night she was attacked and raped while trying to find a friend's apartment. The attack changed her entire life; she became fearful of being anywhere alone. Eventually she moved back home.

While walking Barney one day, he was attacked by a dog. His response to being attacked was that Barney became an aggressive dog. Anytime he saw a dog, he would attack. He didn't like people coming too close either. It made walking Barney very difficult; they couldn't walk where most people did- parks, waterfronts, neighborhoods. That meant Janice had to walk Barney in deserted areas, which exacerbated her memories of being attacked herself.

One vet thought that Janice's fear was triggering Barney's aggression. So twenty years after she was attacked, Janice went back to Berkeley and tried to come to terms with what happened to her. As she walked the street where the attack happened, she thought "the shadow of the past walked with me wherever I went."

At the age of 48, Janice applied to and was accepted into a writing program. She had decided that this was something she needed to pursue, and let her fears go. I am in awe of women who can do this. I have a friend who started a whole new life in her 40s, went back to college, got her degree and is now in a career that she loves. Janice even won an award at her graduation ceremony for a personal essay she wrote about her father, who committed suicide when she was teen.

As Barney aged, he had more medical problems. Anyone who has owned a dog knows how this goes. They made countless visits to vets and specialty vets (I didn't even know there was such a thing as a 'canine dermatologist'). This section of the book really touched my heart, as we had a very sick basset hound and went through many of the same emotions as Janice and her husband.

Short Leash is such a personal book, but it speaks to so many of us. Anyone who has to overcome a trauma, anyone who has loved a dog, anyone who had a tough childhood will find something to identify with here. Janice Gary writes honestly and from her heart, and this book moved me deeply. ( )

Dogs are amazing animals. They give us so much, enriching our lives in ways we can't begin to quantify. All that they ask of us is a little attention, food, and hopefully some love and they will walk by our sides for the whole of their lives, loving us unconditionally and protecting us fiercely. Janice Gary's dog Barney did exactly that for her and she's chronicled the way in which the two of them rescued each other in Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance.

When Janice finds the Lab Rottweiler mix puppy in a parking lot, she has no idea of the importance he'll take on in her life. She is a fearful, damaged person who has never completely healed after a brutal attack she endured as a young woman. She was afraid to walk alone, imagining danger around every curve, wary of unknown people and unable to trust her own intuition about the safety of unfamiliar situations. Barney accompanied her all over, picking up on her panic and fear, being always vigilant and ready to protect her against any and all threats. That he had been attacked by another, bigger dog as a puppy just fueled his dog aggressive behavior. And so these two damaged souls venture out on walks together, keeping each other in check and always alert to the possibility of menace. Janice chooses to walk Barney in empty areas where they won't encounter other dogs or people. In the course of their walks, through all seasons and weather conditions in a wooded park near her home, Janice ruminates on what drives her and she slowly pushes herself to not only recognize the fear she has carried for so long but also to find ways to get past it. She watches Barney's pure enjoyment in nature and she starts to take pleasure in her surroundings and to live in the beauty of the moment even as they must sometimes face their biggest fears (other dogs and people) on their solitary walks.

Alternating between her present, walking in the woods with an aging Barney, and flashbacks grounding her fears in the context of her past, the narrative is lyrical and organic feeling. She writes of her development as a writer and the stumbling blocks she faces in that part of her life (some of which she creates herself). She revels in Barney and her love for him, relying on him as they tramp through the woods. And she muses on her fear of losing this dog who has helped her to grow so much, seeing him slow down, holding her breath through his health crises, wondering how she'll ever let him go and yet knowing she must. The writing here is beautiful and contemplative and spilling over with emotion. The title is clearly a metaphor for Gary's life, the way in she has lived so closely, afraid to venture out beyond her small comfortable radius. But in the end she has spooled that leash out, first taking tentative steps and then more confident strides as she pursues her dream of writing, as she walks down darker paths in the woods, as she lets go of the unhealthy, constraining fear that has had her so tightly leashed for so long, and as she faces life without Barney to protect her. Those who enjoy reading about nature and dogs and the struggle of writing will definitely appreciate the poetic imagery and shimmering language here. We should all be so lucky as to have had long, thoughtful walks with a Barney in our lives. ( )