The protagonist of the novel, Jack is a student in Miss Stretchberry’s class. He begins the novel disinterested in poetry and with no confidence in his own ability to write poetry, but over the…
read analysis of Jack
Miss Stretchberry
Miss Stretchberry is Jack’s teacher. She makes a point to introduce her students to poetry, particularly famous 20th-century poets like Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, and she also encourages her students to write…
read analysis of Miss Stretchberry
Sky/The Yellow Dog
Sky, Jack’s yellow dog, is deceased in the novel’s present. But through his poems, Jack describes his strong, loving relationship with the dog, whom he and his dad adopted from an animal shelter. Sky…
read analysis of Sky/The Yellow Dog
Walter Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014) is a famous American author and Jack’s favorite poet. Miss Stretchberry reads his poem “Love That Boy” to her class, and Jack adores the poem because the father in the…
read analysis of Walter Dean Myers
Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874–1963) was a famous American poet and one that Miss Stretchberry introduces her students to. She reads her class “The Pasture” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” neither of which Jack…
read analysis of Robert Frost
Get the entire Love That Dog LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Jack’s dad appears in Jack’s poems about life at home and about Sky. Jack and his dad appear to have a loving relationship: Jack loves Walter Dean Myers’s poem “Love That Boy”…
read analysis of Jack’s Dad