The Travelling Vet by Jonathan Cranston

          You could have a nice little drinking or chocolate scoffing game in the early chapters of this book having one of your chosen "treats" every time the author mentions he has wanted to be a vet since he was 6 years old - You won't get to the second chapter if you do this however, fortunately the author then does step back on mentioning it quite significantly and I was beginning to dread it being mentioned every other page.  As you can tell this did annoy me, probably more than is reasonable if I'm being honest.

Each tale in the book is about a different client of his - be they a sugar glider, a donkey or even a Giant Panda.  There is not too much about normal domestic pets though so unless you have experience of a more unusual or exotic pet then there is nothing to compare the experiences of owner and vet to.  The nearest we get is a brief foray in to the Theatrical Donkey, and Cattle.  True, there is a chapter on Goats but this seems to be more about an unfortunate wetsuit incident then the animal.

I did enjoy the book but Jonathan Cranston is no James Herriott.  He has a good turn of phrase and a certain wit that is necessary for this sort of tale but something is missing.  I suspect this is the connect we manage to feel with not only the vet himself but colleagues within the practice and their range of patients in James Herriott's books; there is none of this within Mr Cranston's writing.  The nearest we get to learning about any individual (other than the author) is Bjorn in the Wildlife Team in South Africa.

Each chapter ends with some basic information about the particular species in an easily digestible format.  There are also links to various Wildlife Organisations relating to the particular animal.  Whilst I can see the point of these sections they do break the stories up and it becomes a strange cross between a light reference book and a set of loosely linked short stories.

To be entirely honest if you want an emotional journey involving animals then plump for Gerald Durrell or James Herriott, you will likely find those far more satisfying.  This isn't a bad book but you won't get sucked in to the characters and their situations in the same way as these trailblazers in the genre have done.

I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.