Almost Perfect by Diane Daniels Manning (iRead Book Tours)

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I read Almost Perfect by Diane Daniels Manning, in exchange for honest review from iRead Book Tours.

About the Book: 

Two unlikely friends, an old woman and a boy with special needs, take an aging champion to Westminster Dog Show, and heal their troubled families.

Seventy year-old Bess Rutledge has fantasized about winning the Westminster Dog Show all her life, but now she has decided she is too old to follow her dream. She meets Benny, an angry fourteen year-old with mild autism and ADHD, who has a dream of his own: to impress his self-absorbed mother. He becomes convinced that winning Westminster with McCreery, Bess’ aging champion standard poodle, will finally make his mother proud of him. Getting Bess to go along with his plan, however, is not going to be so easy.

About the Author: 

Diane Daniels Manning is the co-founder and director of The New School in the Heights, a therapeutic school in Houston, Texas which helps children dealing with social-emotional challenges find success in school and life. She has a Ph.D. in Education and a post-doctoral M.P.H from Harvard and is a practicing child psychoanalyst certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Formerly, she was the Director of the Reading and Learning Disabilities Clinic at Tufts University, Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Harvard, and Chair of the Department of Education at Tulane University. She learned the inner workings of dog show kennels by writing an authorized oral history of a lifetime President of the Poodle of Club of America. Her writing awards include the Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Prize and the Women in Film and Television Short Script Competition.

When not at The New School, Diane and her writing partners, a Standard Poodle named Misty and a rescue cat named Elvira, convene at the keyboard to share great thoughts and plan the dinner menu.

My Review

I wanted to read the book because I am the mother of two autistic boys. The book is about Benny, who wants a dog, but his father and step mother doesn't want him to have one. His parents told him he has to bring up his grades, but Benny struggles with making straight As. One day, Benny's mother forgets to pick him up from school and he walks home. On the way home, he runs into an abandoned dog kennel, near his home, because he heard a puppy whimpering. 

The book was a good read. I liked Manning's writing style. Even though, I am not a dog person, I wanted Benny to have a dog in the beginning of the book 

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You can purchase the book on Amazon in paperback or Audible format. The book is prime-eligible.