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I’m going to tell you up front (so stop now if you hate spoilers!):  It doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. Dog-Heart is, instead, a real world look at life in Jamaica as seen through the dual narrative of a middle age, middle class woman who sees the spark of promise in a young boy she meets as he is begging – and from the perspective of that boy as he fetches water for his family, tries to succeed in school despite all the obstacles that are thrown in his way, and makes choices – sometimes bad choices – that impact all those around him.

The most amazing thing about this book is how believable each character is.  It is fairly easy to see how McCaulay could channel the voice of Sahara as she talks about life as a ‘browning’ who works in her best friend’s restaurant and struggles to raise her teenage boy on her own – although the book is not autobiography, there are parts of Sahara that match McCaulay’s life.  But McCaulay is just as effective getting inside the head of Dexter, the black ‘pickney’ boy – somebody who is different from her in pretty much every conceivable manner – race, gender, socio-economic status.  She makes his voice just as real, as believable, as she does for Sahara.

When Sahara decides to take on Dexter as a project – to see if she can make a difference in his life by providing him a scholarship to a private school — she quickly learns that she also needs to help his whole family:  his single mother (who is afraid to leave her shack and hasn’t worked in years) and his younger brother and sister, who all rely on his begging to provide the only cash they have for food and clothes and other necessities.  Dexter and his family live in a house with no electricity (except for what they steal from the neighbor by jerry-rigging a line so they can plug in one light and, of course, the television set.)

As Sahara gets more and more entwined in the lives of Dexter and his family, she realizes that her own son is pulling away from her – through a newly found desire to connect to his father, and then through his decision to attend college in America.  She doesn’t ever pretend that Dexter can fill the void that her own son will be leaving, but she does find some solace in being able to do something in the face of such deprivation that so many people in Jamaica endure.

Dexter is not just a two dimensional “poor boy from the ghetto.”  He is a complex character who worries about his younger brother being beat up by the bullies when he goes to get water, and he protects a young girl from being gang raped in his school bathroom – and also does drugs, steals and hangs out with street kids who lead him the wrong way. The decent-ness within is what makes Dexter such a compelling character –even when he makes bad choices that lead to the non-Hollywood ending.

I loved this book.  Although the story is seeped in Jamaica, it is a universal tale of rich and poor, of justice and injustice, of the structural violence of poverty – and, most importantly, one of hope that human connections can transcend the gaps, if one only makes the time and the effort to do so.

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