Book ~ "Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About" (2026) Isabel Klee

From Goodreads ~ A Jersey girl by birth, Isabel Klee had always wanted to live in New York City. At age 20, she got her chance, ditching her college upstate and moving into a grungy basement apartment in Manhattan. Dog-obsessed since childhood, her first post-grad job was becoming an assistant to a dog photographer, and something clicked into place: a career focused on helping dogs was the new dream.

Isabel quickly found a passion for rehabilitating rescue dogs and helping them get adopted. At the same time, she was caught up in a whirlwind of friendships, parties, fickle boyfriends and grand romances, which she recounts in honest, tender and sometimes devastating chapters about the search for love and belonging.

Isabel’s first true love, though, was Simon, a fluffy puppy who’d been saved from the meat trade. As the highs and lows of her twenties hit Isabel in wave after wave, it was Simon who kept her grounded. Together, Isabel and Simon created a community of dog-lovers and a tight-knit group of friends pursuing their dreams.

In this honest and moving memoir, Isabel weaves together the stories of her foster dogs—and the challenges she helped them overcome - with tales of complicated relationships, hard decisions and great loves in New York City, all leading to a happy ending not only for the rescue pups, but for Isabel herself.

I've never heard of Isabel Klee or this book but I saw it was an Indigo pick of the month. I like memoirs and reading about dogs (and animals) so thought I'd check it out, especially since I volunteer with a cat rescue and a charitable organization dedicated to ageing dogs. 

I enjoyed the parts about her putting her hand up to foster dogs who had issues and socializing them for adoption. I didn't find her overly likeable, though, and it got tiresome hearing the details of all her broken romances and dating adventures, which took up the bulk of the book. Against her better judgement, she moved in with men who professed they loved her and she loved them but then she would end up moving out because she was their whole world.

The editing could have been tighter. At one point, she talks about Ruby, the family dog when she was growing up, who passed away when she was 16 and then just three paragraphs later, she says she was 17 when Ruby passed away. The timeline jumps around so sometimes I found it confusing when things were happening. As a head's up, there is swearing.