Review of Wendy N Wagner’s An Oath of Dogs

I try to encourage my students to move beyond simple reviews of “good” and “bad,” and instead to consider who a work of art is made for. Are they the target audience? When it comes to Wendy N Wagner’s An Oath of Dogs, I suspect the target audience is: Me.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

But maybe it’s for you, too. Are you skeptical of the power of rapacious corporations extracting profit at the expense of the environment and the working class who live in it? But do you also acknowledge the people involved are often conflicted or outright reluctant to participate yet cannot figure out a way to challenge the system? Do you like science fiction that explores highly relevant contemporary social issues while still being smart about technological and biological plausibility? Does the idea of colonizing space excite you while also worrying you because of our human history of colonialism? Do you have complicated feelings about religion, recognizing the dignity of religious people and the beauty of belief systems while also seeing the way religions can be systems of oppression people impose upon themselves and others? Do you like characters who are nuanced, flawed, and believable but ultimately likable and admirable? Do you like carefully constructed mysteries where the clues come together in a thoughtful, satisfying way? Oh, and do you like dogs? Then this book is for you, too!

One of the trickiest parts of writing a mystery on a colony world with a large cast of characters and is that Wagner has to manage an ending that resolves the mystery and lets us know where the characters end up without magically solving all the interplanetary environmental and socio-economic problems in the universe in a way that would feel inauthentic. I felt like all my questions about the characters were answered, but the larger issues still left me contemplating moral dilemmas in just the way Wagner intended. I do have one burning question remaining, though: Which Wendy N. Wagner book should I read next?