A Home for Goddesses and Dogs

Overview

Leslie Connor's middle-grade novel follows thirteen-year-old Lydia in the aftermath of her mother's death, as she leaves the only home she's known to live with her aunt on a Connecticut farm. The household she joins is small and unusual: her aunt Brat, Brat's wife Eileen, and an elderly landlord named Elloroy who has lived on the property for years. All three are kind, if eccentric, and each is trying to make room for a grieving girl who isn't sure she belongs.

Lydia's adjustment gets more complicated when her new guardians bring home a large, skittish stray dog almost as soon as she arrives. The dog is unpredictable — he slips his leash, disappears into the woods, and reacts with fear to things no one else can see — and Lydia, who has never considered herself a dog person, resents the intrusion even as she starts to notice how much the animal is carrying inside him.

Running underneath the story of the dog's rehabilitation is Lydia's own reluctance to be known. She is keeping a box of papers hidden under her bed and quietly widening a hole in her bedroom wall, and she isn't ready to explain why. Connor lets the girl's guardedness and the dog's wariness mirror each other, building toward a shared reckoning with what each of them has been through.

A Story About What Broken Things Need to Heal

Connor, whose earlier novel The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle was a National Book Award finalist, has built a career writing about young people who are underestimated or overlooked, and this book extends that interest to a girl who has just lost the one relationship she could count on. The novel is less concerned with the mechanics of grief than with what comes after it — the slow, often unglamorous work of letting new people in when the old sense of safety is gone.

The dog functions as more than comic relief or a sentimental device; his damaged trust becomes a way for the book to talk about trauma without requiring its young readers to name it directly. Lydia's insistence that she isn't hiding anything, set against the growing evidence that she is, gives the novel a quiet tension that keeps the emotional stakes grounded in specific, concrete details rather than abstraction. The result is a book that has been recognized as a Junior Library Guild Selection and is often shelved alongside other contemporary middle-grade fiction that treats family loss and non-traditional households as ordinary facts of a child's life rather than as problems to be solved.

Why A Home for Goddesses and Dogs Has Been Challenged

Aimed at readers roughly in the upper-elementary to middle-school range, the book has drawn scrutiny less for its central story of grief and animal rescue than for one detail of its setting: Lydia's aunt is married to another woman, and that marriage is presented without comment as a normal, loving home. Objecting adults have argued that a same-sex-headed household is not age-appropriate subject matter for the book's intended readers, or that it introduces a topic they believe schools should leave to families to address. Some challenges have also cited the novel's frank engagement with a parent's death and its aftermath as heavy material for younger children, though this concern has been raised far less often than the objection to the family structure itself. In total, the novel has been formally challenged in two states and two school districts tracked in this catalog, with reviewers in each case weighing its handling of family and loss against community standards for elementary and middle-grade collections.