The Winter Door, by Isobelle Carmody

[rachelmanija]

Sequel to Night Gate, in which, you may recall, I was fascinated by the twelve-year-old heroine's stirrings-of-first-love relationship with Billy Thunder, her dog who turns into an attractive teenage boy when they go to fantasyland together to try to wake her mother from a coma.

Now back in the real world, it turns out that Rage's mom briefly rallied, but is now worse than ever. Oops. To Rage's sorrow, Billy Thunder is a dog again. For the first half of the novel, Rage has brief dreams of fantasyland, but much of the action involves her battle and then friendship with a troubled bully from her school, Logan. A human rival for Billy Thunder, I thought.

But when she finally confides her magical adventures to Logan, he becomes fascinated - even a bit obsessed - with her descriptions of Elle, her dog who became a beautiful blonde girl. For the rest of the book, she and Logan have somewhat random fantasyland adventures while Rage longs for Billy Thunder and Logan longs for Elle. This is the first novel I've ever read in which the romantic quadrangle consists of two humans and two transformed dogs.

A third book was promised, but that was seven years ago.

Winter Door

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Yes, this seems like a story element that most Western publishers would find questionable, to say the least. On the other hand, human/transformed dog attractions are more common than you'd expect in manga, especially in BL, most notably the lightheartedly porntastic "Man's Best Friend" (in which even when the dog shapeshifts into human form, he can barely talk and has rather low-I.Q. human intelligence, at best).

On the other hand, the shoujo (girls') manga "Guru Guru Pon-chan" handles this theme more along the lines of "Night Gate"/"The Winter Door." In this series, the girl dog Ponta has been repeatedly transforming back and forth between her human and canine forms ever since she was a puppy, courtesy of a magic bone her owner invented. So, for all practical purposes, she is a were-dog--although when she goes to school she seems unable to learn how to read, whether because she's just too easily distracted by everything else going on around her or because she initially aged at a canine rate, going from toddler to adolescent within one year (which presumably affects her mental and psychological maturity level). Also, the guy she falls for is a neighbor, not a member of the family who owns her, although she does sort of imprint on him when he saves her from getting run over the first time she accidentally turns into a human and toddles out into traffic. I haven't read the final volume of the series yet, but it seems as if even if the boy and the shape-shifting dog don't actually end up together, the mangaka is heading toward presenting the prospect of things not working out for them as some kind of interspecies Romeo and Juliet-type tragedy.