Read vs Listen: Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I've Cried About

A first-person memoir read by the person who wrote it, against a chapter heading that carries the only date in the book.

Confidence 78%, which puts it in the leaning band. Bands run from close call at 50 to 64, through leaning at 65 to 79 and clear at 80 to 94, up to clear cut at 95 and above.

What this book actually is

A chaptered memoir with a frame, not a standalone essay collection. Publishers Weekly records that it is bookended by Klee's preparation for a television interview in the summer of 2024, and that it spans eleven years beginning with her decision to move to New York City after dropping out of college. Two strands run through it and interleave: fostering and rescue on one side, dating and relationships on the other. Isabel Klee is the creator behind @simonsits, with 1.2 million TikTok followers at publication, documenting rescue dogs with the New York organisation Muddy Paws.

The shape is the thing worth knowing before you choose a format. Every chapter is headed with a season and a year, but the material inside a chapter is not confined to it, and the foster dog stories are interspersed out of order. Published sources disagree on the label, one calling the chapters interconnected essays and another treating the book as a continuous memoir, which lands at chapters that read as near self-contained pieces inside a single decade-long arc. There is no index, no glossary and no chronology on record. Nor is there a cast list, which matters more than it sounds: no source publishes a count of how many named dogs pass through the book, so the size of that load is genuinely unknown rather than known to be small.

The case for reading it

The case for print rests on a single feature, and it is not a small one. The chronology moves back and forth inside a broadly forward-moving decade, and the printed season and year is the only device the book offers for placing a scene. Readers say so themselves: that the timeline was sometimes hard to follow, that a chapter headed with one summer turned out to have moved years ahead, that a dog from a completely different year turns up inside a chapter dated elsewhere. On a page you can glance up at the heading, or flick back two chapters to check. Neither of those is a thing you can do at a red light.

What is not an argument for print, on the evidence available, is pictures. Nothing on record shows a photo insert in any edition. No retail, library or trade metadata lists illustrations or plates, and the Publishers Weekly bibliographic line, which flags photographs when a title has them, carries no photo note. Two readers wished for pictures rather than describing them, and pointed each other to Klee's social media instead, but those readers may have had galley copies, and galleys routinely drop photo sections. So this is unresolved, not settled, and it should not be treated as a reason to buy print until someone checks a finished copy.

The case for listening to it

Klee reads it, and that is confirmed four ways over: Audible, Apple Books, the library record and the Kirkus audio review, with the UK listing naming her too. The check for author narration exists for exactly this situation, a first-person account read by the person who lived it, and it is doing more work here than usual because her public work is spoken. One reader records that the written voice is very similar to the voiceovers on her videos, which is a reasonable proxy for how much the audio is the native edition rather than a convenience.

The structure suits it as well. One point of view the whole way, no second narrator, no letters or transcripts, no reference apparatus to hold a finger in. The recurring names are few in the published sources. And at 8 hours 7 minutes, about 5 hours 25 minutes at one and a half times speed, it is a short listen by the standards of most books on this site.

The audiobook in detail

Released unabridged in the US on 28 April 2026, the same day as the hardback, credited to William Morrow on Apple Books and Audible and to Harper Audio by Kirkus, both of which sit inside HarperCollins. A second listing covers the UK and Commonwealth under Little, Brown Book Group, ISBN 9781405568203 through Little, Brown Audio, dated 30 April 2026. Both name Klee as narrator and both carry the same run time, which is consistent with one recording licensed into two territories, but no source states that, so treat the two as separate listings rather than a confirmed single master.

There are no audio awards, and none is a fair reading rather than an omission, because the Audies cycle covering 2026 titles had not been announced when this was compiled. No accompanying PDF is listed on either edition. Two things a buyer might reasonably want are simply not published anywhere: the chapter count and chapter lengths, and whether the recording reads the season and year headings aloud. Both can be settled from the Audible sample and the chapter list in a few minutes, and the second of the two is the one that would move this verdict. Nor is it recorded whether the book has an author's note, acknowledgements or an afterword, or whether any of that made it into the recording.

Who should ignore this verdict

Anyone who reads for structure and wants to see where each chapter is standing in the eleven years, because that heading is the whole navigational system and print keeps it in front of you. Anyone who wants to go back to one particular dog's story later, since there is no index and audio leaves you scrubbing through chapters headed with the wrong year. And anyone who checks a finished copy and finds a photo section in it, which would move the whole question, though nothing on record shows one. Two smaller notes for buyers. The page count is given as 288 for the US hardback and 283 for the Kindle edition, and no UK page count is published at all, so do not expect the figures to agree. And the run time is identical across the two territorial audio listings, which means whichever one your account puts in front of you, the listening time is the same.

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