Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize "[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read ...

Fifteen Dogs is not a very ambitious book, but it hits its targets. Not everyone in NUBClub read it (hearing that it's about how dogs die was a turn-off to some of us), but those that did were pleasantly surprised by the quality of it. The storyworld here is simple but powerful -- Apollo and Hermes are gods on Earth, and make a bet about whether any dog given human intelligence will die happy and then gift fifteen dogs in a shelter that ability to see the results. Alexis does a good job creating the society of the dogs and pulling it to smart conclusions. In particular, the powerful conflict in the pack and the questions about what life is best make a interesting plot. This leads to some more predictable places, for example having an artist (in this case, a poet) as one weird dogs obsessed with language or diving hard into how an intelligent dog understands its love to its human companions, but even in these cases, Alexis brings some good writing and interesting insights. The meditation on what love is for one dog is powerful and moving and that alone is worth reading about. Of course, none of the concepts are that revolutionary. You'll see coming the fact that the dogs can't go back to their innocent times, that trust and betrayal become issues with intelligence, and that art redeems. We honestly felt that the treatment of the gods as immortal things that craze some kind of mortality and change was the best choice of the book and every scene with Apollo and Hermes sang. Overall, the book does better than you expect it to given its premise. Where an apologue like this could have be trite or childish or cheesy, Alexis both makes bolder choices that you guessed and executes the scenes of the more predictable ones more deftly than you feared. It's worth a read if you want something light and enjoyable that doesn't need to be profoundly original.