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Top of the class

Imagination unleashed

A 9-year-old churns out stories of adventurous girls and vulnerable dogs, and her audience just can't get enough.

By VALERIE TAYLOR
Published March 10, 2005

Ashley Roth's love of dogs has taken her to many places, from Upper Michigan to Alaska and from Philadelphia to Freutia Island. Never heard of Freutia? It's an island near Greenland - in Ashley's imagination.

In her make-believe world, the 9-year-old Brooksville Elementary student and her "posse" of up to 18 girls go through magic corridors, on a submarine and back in time to the 1700s. They've been followed by a hurricane that has pursued them from Brooksville all the way to Lake Superior, and they've escaped from an evil female werewolf named Therese. And always there's a dog to rescue.

Ashley has chronicled the fantastic adventures of the Canine Girls in six books so far. At school, her fourth-grade classmates sit spellbound as she reads about the heroes, the villains who would thwart them, and the dogs and their predicaments.

The students are eager to hear if their names pop up in the plot, because Ashley uses her friends, relatives and classmates as characters.

"None of the Canine Girls are make-believe," says Ashley, who has never visited some of the settings for her stories. "And most of the stuff they say in the stories is based on their personalities, their actions, traits and complexions."

Ashley is often besieged by her classmates, making suggestions on what she could have them doing in the next installment.

"This is edge-of-your-seat reading," said Ashley's teacher, Suzanne Hays. "I'd love to be able to be sitting at my desk grading some papers and catching up on stuff, but I can't do it. When she's reading her book, you do not do anything but listen."

Ashley can't remember a time when she wasn't thinking of stories, but the words were locked in her imagination because she had no outlet. She hadn't learned to write yet.

"At first, I was doing, like, wavy lines, pretending they were letters. And I made up stuff that were in those lines, and read them to my parents," she said.

After learning to write cursive, she wrote adventure stories here and there but stopped because her hand would hurt. Then, one day, at the beginning of this school year, sitting at home and bored, the idea for the rescued-dogs series popped into her head.

She went to the computer and started hunting and pecking her way to Buddy, A True Hero to Florida, using a diabetic golden retriever as the lucky dog that is saved on the Island of Freutia - after the girls are threatened by a giant squid and a hammerhead shark while they're diving in a submarine looking for the remains of the Titanic.

Ashley features a different breed of dog in each book and illustrates each book cover with the dog featured. Her own dog, Abby, was the star of one book, and her aunt's German shepherd/border collie is debuting in the just-finished sixth book, Shelby, the New Year's Miracle.

"It's about a sometimes sissy dog who's dog-napped by an evil and lame weatherman," Ashley said. "And it's just my best book ever."

Reading an installment from the book was postponed until after the FCATs.

"But the kids are on pins and needles," Hays said.

Hays has nicknamed her resident writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, after the author of the Little House books, which inspired the TV series Little House on the Prairie.

"I'm hoping that I can get (my stories) published and be sent out into bookstores and stuff," Ashley said. "And, hopefully, I'll become like a Laura Ingalls Wilder."

The prolific writer sees an end to the series, though.

"I want to stop (the series) at 40. I'm hoping to do some novels or horror stories," she said, pausing. "And maybe another series with the Canine Girls, and dogs, and their adventures - but maybe an older version of the girls."

[Last modified March 10, 2005, 01:14:16]