My Life in Dog Years Characters

Dog's Best Friend Mr. Paulsen is the guy who's telling the story, and in case you haven't noticed, he's a big fan of dogs. I am—I say this with some pride and not a little wonder—a "dog person....

In a book packed with unique dogs, Josh is a unicorn. (Technically, he's a border collie—"the quintessential border collie," even. Anyway, you know what we mean.) Understand that I've had hundred...

Snowball was a black dog with a white circle on her side (hence her cheesy name). Tall, "with a thin hound look," she had one floppy ear and a "tail tightly curved over her back" (2.29). As Paulsen...

Ike, a big black Lab, was a fine hunter and a loyal friend. Like many of the dogs featured in the book, he wasn't actually Paulsen's pet. (He belonged to someone else—more on that in a minute.) S...

You know how some dogs have a bark that's worse than their bite? That's not Dirk. Dirk is a dog that liked to bite people. A lot. Named by Paulsen after a hardboiled detective in a mystery novel, D...

Rex, a chubby collie whose preferred hair product was fresh cow manure, was a farm dog through and through. His chapter is a little different from the other dogs' in that Paulsen uses Rex to stand...

If Hagrid from Harry Potter were a dog, he'd be Caesar. Roughly the size of a small dinosaur, Caesar,  a Great Dane, […] stood forty-one inches at the front shoulder…and when he got up on...

Paulsen bought Fred as a puppy outside a bookstore from a child grafter who tried to fleece him for $50. (The kid got $5.) "Half Lab and half something" (7.9), Fred immediately bit Paulsen, setting...

The first thing you need to know is she had the coolest name of all the dogs—Cookie. (No, not that Cookie.)Secondly, Cookie was an Alaskan sled dog. She makes only a brief appearance in the book,...

Quincy was a dirty-looking mop dog that, according to Paulsen, "did not look like much of a dog at all" (8.1). Sometimes looks can be deceiving, though. Much to the author's surprise, Quincy turned...

Paulsen only mentions his parents a few times in the early chapters, and none of what he says sounds good. Reading between the lines, we see a progression in which his relationship with them grows...

As a teenager, Paulsen was terrorized by a local gang that beat him up and stole his money on the reg. "Happy was built like an upright freezer and had just about half the intelligence," Paulsen sa...

Pig is Fred's good pal and a pet to the Paulsen family. Paulsen fully intended to raise Pig for meat, but he never got around to eating him.