“I Didn’t Choose The Pug Life. The Pug Life Chose Me.” My new t-shirt from the Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue organization proclaims this in bold type for anyone who thinks my interest in pugs might be an exercise of free will. I was a goner soon after I met my first snorting, strong-willed, big-eyed, no-nosed, grinning, snaggle-toothed, curly-tongued, adorable pug dog—a small black Old Town resident named Lucy. Therefore, I picked up Alison Pace’s two books, Pug Hill and its sequel, A Pug Tale, with the knowledge that at least I would be interested in a book whose characters owned and interacted with remarkable, comical canines. Pug Hill stars the thirty-one-year-old Hope McNeill, a woman who feels at a crossroads when it comes to her identity, love life, and family. She is somewhat like a Sex and the City character, only subdued. As a painting restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she lives on the Upper West Side in New York City and makes her way to work across Central Park every day. A self-proclaimed introvert in the middle of an unsatisfying relationship, Hope is asked to give a speech at her parents’ fortieth-anniversary party. Terrified of public speaking, she decides to face her fears and enroll in a speech-making class at the New School. In the meantime, she pines after her cute museum colleague, Elliott, and grows tired of the ultra-athletic, WASP-y pretensions of her Jewish boyfriend, whose annoying identity crisis merely highlights her own feelings of being part-Catholic and part-Jewish but really nowhere. Unable to get her own dog, Hope always manages to find respite at the informally named Pug Hill, an area of Central Park near the famous Alice in Wonderland statue. Pugs and their humans arrive on the weekend and on Sundays in particular to run…