Life in Shambles? Grab Your Passport and Follow That Mutt.
There is a certain kind of midlife woman in literature, maybe you know the type: She is attractive, intelligent, generally beloved by friends and family. She is also secretly (or not so secretly) a mess — whipsawed by an unhappy marriage, an emptying nest or mere existential dread.
Amy Webb, the vexed protagonist of Lauren Grodstein's tart, emotionally attuned novel 'A Dog in Georgia,' is one of those unlucky lucky ladies, a former chef whose well-ordered life — a handsome and affectionate husband, a sprawling East Village apartment, a stepson successfully sent off to college — is fraying badly at the edges.
The husband, a charismatic bear of a man named Judd, spends long hours happily absorbed in the chic downtown bistro he owns and operates, and 19-year-old Ferris, now a Cornell sophomore, no longer needs his stepmother's constant care. That doesn't leave Amy much to do other than pick up fresh produce from the farmers' market, fret over her gentle German shepherd and gaze at her phone, a Möbius loop of unlikely animal-friendship videos — a baby goat cozying up to a donkey, a stray kitten nursed by a terrier — set to soothe.
So when it appears that Judd has stepped outside their marriage again with a new and distressingly nubile employee (Amy is well familiar with her husband's susceptibility to the charms of pretty young women in his orbit; 15 years ago, she was one of them), she has a choice to make. She can stay and work through another infidelity, or file for divorce.
Or she can fly to Georgia, the small, politically unstable country wedged between Russia and Turkey on the Black Sea, and locate a lost dog named Angel that she knows only from the internet. Before the flummoxed people in her life can stop her, Amy is on a plane to the capital, Tbilisi, ready to lose herself in a rescue mission so quixotic that even Irine, the woman who runs Angel's website, can't quite believe she's there.
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