"You might say the Santa Barbara crises had been timed perfectly for my circumstances," writes narrator Penny Rush on the first page of THE DOG OF THE NORTH. She's about to board a train from Santa Cruz --- where she's been living in a motel for three weeks after the collapse of her marriage --- to Santa Barbara, where her grandparents are experiencing crises that she needs to solve. Penny, who is in her mid-30s, is basically broke, having also lost her job. So she is perhaps overly reliant on the kindness of strangers --- but that reliance is, in part, what leads to the truly wild sequence of events that follows.

"Very few novels prompt me to truly laugh out loud, but THE DOG OF THE NORTH did. Penny's misadventures might prove cathartic not only for her, but for readers as well."

Penny's grandmother, Dr. Pincer, is in trouble after brandishing a gun at the Meals on Wheels volunteers who had showed up at her squalid house. Along with Pincer's accountant, Burt, Penny has hatched a plan to lure Pincer away from her home for a few hours, bring in a cleaning service, and find and confiscate the gun before she can harm herself or others. But that plan, like so many others that follow, goes awry when the cleaning company finds --- in addition to numerous rats, both alive and in various stages of decomposition --- decades-old human remains in the backyard shed. Suddenly, Pincer is being questioned by the police.

Did I mention that Penny's grandfather, Arlo, is also having a crisis? His second (and significantly younger) wife, Doris, has decided she is tired of having him around the house. Eager to make a difference, Penny packs up Arlo and moves him into the Palms retirement home in a single afternoon, incurring the wrath of Doris, who apparently wanted the satisfaction of doing so herself.

In the meantime, twin health crises --- Penny's and Burt's --- are complicating matters further, along with Burt's tiny shedding dog and his oddly attractive brother. Tying together all of these elements is Burt's ancient, dilapidated van, the titular Dog of the North, which serves as Penny's transportation and her temporary home for much of the novel. There's so much more to mention about what happens next, including a spontaneous trip to Australia and a reunion with Penny's childhood pediatrician. But suffice it to say that THE DOG OF THE NORTH unfolds at a rapid pace with nary a dull moment.

Elizabeth McKenzie draws her title from Charles Portis' THE DOG OF THE SOUTH. Like that classic novel, her latest includes not only a truly memorable narrative voice but also a nonstop array of ridiculous situations and bizarre yet endearing secondary characters. Penny's journey might be, on many levels, a distraction from the traumas in her life. In addition to the end of her marriage, she is still coping with the disappearance of her parents in the Australian outback five years earlier and a pretty creepy relationship with her biological father. But that background only serves to turn up the volume on the ludicrous events that unfold.

Very few novels prompt me to truly laugh out loud, but THE DOG OF THE NORTH did. Penny's misadventures might prove cathartic not only for her, but for readers as well.