Book Review: Katie Up and Down the Hall

The iPad has ruined my reading habits. Sure, it has the Kindle application, the Nook application (under which I have something like 50 books), and iBooks, so it has access to more books than just about any other portable device. It’s much faster than my Nook ever was, which makes reading easier. It also hasn’t crashed yet, as compared to the Nook that might has well have been running Windows™

The problem, you see, is that the iPad is fantastic for reading comic books. I have started quite a few different books the past couple of months, both paper and electronic, and then somehow ended up reading comics. It’s tough competing with Spider-Man from the 70s, the Fantastic Four during John Byrne’s epic run, or Fables when you are dealing with an overgrown adolescent.

But on Thursday I started the review copy of Katie Up and Down the Hall that Goldberg McDuffie Communications sent me a couple of months ago. I finished it Friday night.

I’ll be honest, it’s not the only review book I was sent this summer…but you can tell by the dearth of reviews on this site it’s the only one I finished.

Katie is about a cocker spaniel and the ad hoc family she forms around herself in an apartment building in Battery Park City. For those of you not familiar with New York City neighborhoods, Battery Park City is a community on the southwestern tip of Manhatten. It was formed from the soil and rocks excavated when the World Trade Center was built.

The book opens with a description of Battery Park City and how the author, Glenn Paskin, ended up moving there and then later adopting Katie. From there we’re swept up into a tale of how she created a family from some of the tenants in the building: Pearl and Arthur, an elderly couple, John and Ryan, a single Dad and his son, Lee, a woman who befriends Pearl during the confusion of 9/11, and a few other people who come in and out of Katie and Glenn’s lives.

It’s a heartwarming and poignant story that spans all of Katie’s years, including a harrowing, compelling and thankfully apolitical, description of September 11, 2001. (Battery Park City borders the World Trade Center, putting the story almost at Ground Zero.)

Glenn Paskin is a journalist, interviewer, ghost writer, and novelist. His extensive experience and background is evident in his writing. His descriptions of Katie and her interactions with the book’s other wonderful characters were very entertaining and yeah, I even teared up a bit a few times. You’ll know where I mean.

Mr. Paskin is honest. This is a true story, "true" in the sense that it happened and "true" in the sense that Mr. Paskin shares his feelings, his mistakes, his regrets, and his misgivings. While this book is fun and inspiring, it couldn’t have always been easy to write, and my hat goes off to Mr. Paskin’s for his courage.

Katie Up and Down the Hall is a great read and I heartily recommend it. You can pre-order it here on Amazon.com, in Kindle or Hardcover.