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Simone's farmer parents are all work and no play. A dour, bookish pair, they have Plato or Edward Gibbon in hand as often as a pitchfork. Their daughter is valued mainly as bean picker or chicken wrangler, while a frivolity like Christmas is a "waste of a good tree."

Simone's affections, no surprise, fix on Red, the family horse. She rides him out to a stone ruin at the end of the acreage and indulges in her own booklist: Steinbeck, Tolkien, Richler.

The escape comes after high-school graduation. The parents lose a free worker and Montreal gains a student of ancient history.

Simone hops from a one apartment to another, seeking warmer digs to fend off the city's deep freeze.

For her final year, she settles into a dilapidated, woodstove-heated place on a cobbled street and, catching the September warmth, does schoolwork on the front stoop. "I was the opposite of a flâneur. I sat in one place and watched the city walk by."

To this point, the doggy focus implied by J. R. Carpenter's title has been more evident in her framing notes. Aside from thanking 20 dogs in her acknowledgments, Carpenter advises that while the book's people are figments, the dogs are real and "telling the truth."

Our first notable canine is Mingus, his opening salvo a urinary christening of Simone's apartment stoop. Julie, his human mummy, is dutifully mortified. A friendship develops, leading to Simone's infatuation with Julie's cabinetmaker friend Theo. With her history degree making her a long shot for the job search, Simone gets work on the Web team at Julie's office. By now, she and Theo are sharing a sunny apartment and a collie-lab cross named Isaac.

The novel, meanwhile, drifting along with the rhythms of these easygoing, un-messy young lives, hasn't yet built to something beyond ordinary days and familiar dog stories. Charming though Simone's rambling, anecdotal voice is, I began to hope for a bit of conflict or struggle. Simone and Theo are not seen to behave badly or even unpredictably. They have a life with no rough edges or serious missteps. They share a bed, but no evident sex life.

When a bickering and unproductive conference call at Simone's workplace fills most of six pages, it begins to look as if the minor players will bear the book's allotment of human failings.

A two-week holiday in Rome instantly invigorates both Simone and her author, pulling them into a fresh engagement with the moment. Tourism's pitfalls are amusingly evoked. Heading crosstown by car with a new Roman friend, Simone asks how long the trip will take and hears a clipped, "It is impossible to know this."

Noting the packs of stray dogs, she looks up the Italian for "dog," but with perturbing results. "For the rest of my time in Rome I confused the words cane and carne, remarking on the wild meats of Rome and asking in restaurants for food with no dog in it."

The final dog story takes us at last into some suspenseful drama and emotional depth. If you've ever loved a dog, Carpenter's last act should have you rooting for stricken Isaac like he's one of your own.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.