Love That Dog Themes

The verse novel Love That Dog follows a young student, Jack, throughout his year in Miss Stretchberry’s class. Miss Stretchberry makes a point to introduce her students to poetry, reading them poems by American poets like William Carlos Williams and Valerie Worth. Jack begins the novel disinterested in poetry, particularly in writing it. However, with Miss Stretchberry’s tutelage and encouragement, Jack makes several important discoveries: first, poetry doesn’t have to be stuffy and…

Though readers of Love That Dog hear only one voice (that of Jack, the child protagonist), his beloved teacher, Miss Stretchberry, nevertheless looms large over the novel. Love That Dog takes the form of Jack’s school assignment: weekly entries in a poetry journal, in which he writes poems of his own and engages in one-sided conversations with Miss Stretchberry. (Her questions and responses to Jack are merely implied.) Over the course of Jack’s…

Throughout the year that Jack spends in Miss Stretchberry’s classroom, his confidence and pride in his own work and abilities grows exponentially. This is something that Love That Dog attributes both to Miss Stretchberry’s unwavering support and to the fact that Jack finds something (poetry, specifically the work of Walter Dean Myers) to be passionate about and work to emulate. It’s not until Miss Stretchberry begins introducing poets whose poems resonate more with…