This cast centers on a small Wisconsin kennel where the Sawtelle family breeds a singular line of dogs with near-human intuition. The story reimagines Hamlet through a boy who cannot speak, the animals who understand him, and the fracture that opens when grief and jealousy enter the house. Bonds of love, loyalty, and legacy drive the characters toward a tragic reckoning.
Main Characters
Edgar Sawtelle
Edgar is a mute boy whose fluency in signs and acute reading of bodies and dogs make him the novel’s most attentive witness. After his father’s sudden death, his certainty that his uncle is responsible pushes him from suspicion to action, then into the wilderness and back again. Defined by fierce loyalty—especially to the dogs he helps raise—he perceives truths others miss, yet struggles to make the world hear them. His journey from sheltered son to fugitive and avenger is a painful coming-of-age shaped by love for his family and by the unshakeable bond with Almondine.
Gar Sawtelle
Gar is the steady, gentle patriarch who inherits the kennel and devotes his life to breeding and raising the Sawtelle dogs. A moral center remembered through stories and flashbacks, he embodies patience, craft, and an almost spiritual connection to animals. His complicated history with his younger brother—shadowed by rivalry and an old dog named Forte—casts a long, dark line across the present. Even in death, his presence guides Edgar, whose grief becomes the engine of the plot.
Trudy Sawtelle
Trudy is a pragmatic, highly skilled trainer whose hard-won competence anchors the kennel after loss. Haunted by past traumas and miscarriages, she protects what she can—home, dogs, livelihood—even when her choices estrange her from her son. Her relationship with Claude grows out of grief and necessity, complicating what she owes to memory, to survival, and to Edgar. Trudy’s ambiguity—how much she knows, what she allows—keeps the family’s moral center in tension.
Claude Sawtelle
Claude is the charming, restless younger brother whose return unsettles the farm and everyone on it. Adept at ingratiating himself while masking resentments, he presses into the space Gar’s death leaves, securing power through seduction, manipulation, and menace. His rivalry with Gar and hostility toward Edgar simmer into open conflict as he seeks control of the legacy he believes was denied him. Claude’s final, catastrophic choices expose the corrosive ambition beneath his smooth exterior.
Almondine
Almondine is Edgar’s lifelong canine companion, a Sawtelle dog whose point-of-view chapters reveal a consciousness attuned to scent, stillness, and emotional weather. She is guardian, confidante, and mirror—catching shifts in the family long before they surface in words. Her devotion grounds Edgar’s identity, offering him a listener when no one else can hear. Her death while he is away severs his last intact bond to childhood and home.
Supporting Characters
Doctor Papineau
Doctor Papineau (Page) is the kindly local vet and longtime friend-investor in the kennel, a genial elder whose steadiness buffers the family. His accidental death at Edgar’s hands collapses the fragile peace, forcing Edgar into flight and catalyzing the novel’s final movements. As a moral touchstone, his loss marks the end of innocence.
Glen Papineau
Glen is the Mellen sheriff and grieving son who becomes a blunt instrument of pursuit. Eager for answers and easily steered, he channels sorrow into suspicion, letting Claude’s insinuations harden into a hunt for Edgar. His clumsy righteousness turns him from background presence into a dangerous adversary.
Henry Lamb
Henry is a solitary, tender-hearted man who shelters Edgar and the dogs during their forest exile. Nursing his own heartbreak, he offers simple decency, an alternative rhythm of life that contrasts the farm’s pressures and secrets. His quiet care gives Edgar space to heal, think, and choose his return.
Minor Characters
- John Sawtelle: Edgar’s grandfather and founder of the kennel, whose philosophy of breeding and training establishes the family’s legacy.
- Mr. Schultz: The farm’s shadowy original owner, known only through the house and barn’s oddities—a ghost without a story.
- Ida Paine: The uncanny grocer whose cryptic warning about a bottle foreshadows poison and fate.
- Louisa Wilkes: The teacher for the deaf who introduces sign language to the family, effectively giving Edgar his voice.
- Forte: The powerful stray Gar and Claude once kept; the story of his end crystallizes the brothers’ rivalry and moral divide.
- The Stray (Forte II): A starving German Shepherd Edgar attempts to tame, whose presence reignites conflict and violence on the farm.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the story’s center stands the Sawtelle family: Gar and Trudy’s partnership blends intuition and discipline, while Edgar, their beloved son, grows up fluent in dogs and silence. Claude’s return destabilizes that balance, turning old sibling rivalry into a battle over legacy, authority, and desire. The triangle of Edgar, Trudy, and Claude becomes the novel’s crucible—Edgar’s certainty colliding with Trudy’s grief and pragmatism, all under Claude’s calculated charm.
Edgar and Almondine form the book’s purest bond, a wordless alliance that models trust and mutual comprehension. Where human relationships spiral into ambiguity, this partnership stays clear; Almondine senses fractures and danger long before they surface, and Edgar’s identity is inseparable from her steady presence. Her absence leaves him exposed—emotionally and strategically—when he returns to confront what’s broken.
Around the farm, community figures refract the family drama. Doctor Papineau’s benevolence suggests a kinder social order that cannot survive the story’s darker currents, while Henry Lamb offers a gentler world that might have been, had Edgar chosen it. In contrast, Glen Papineau, blinded by grief and easily influenced, becomes an unwitting agent of Claude’s will. Together these relationships sketch two opposing currents—care and manipulation—between which Edgar must navigate, with the kennel and its dogs as both refuge and battleground.