Themes of eco-awareness, diversity, economic disparity, and the like have become nearly as prevalent in kids’ fiction as the old default messages of believing in yourself and not being afraid to be different. An issue as specific as the banning of pit bulls is not one you often see driving a YA novel, but it’s the one Toronto author Ingrid Lee’s Dog Lost sets its sights on.

The novel’s setup is fairly routine, and stock characters abound. There is Mackenzie, the lonely young boy living with his angry, impatient, and occasionally violent alcoholic father. His father brings the boy a pit bull pup (winnings from a poker game), and almost immediately, boy and dog fall in love. The gathering clouds come in the form of a public fear of pit bulls and a looming municipal ban. There is also a group of shady dog-fight organizers who throw the dog (which Mackenzie names “Cash”) into the ring, after the father, in a fit of anger, takes it from his son and abandons it in a field.

We get all this, plus a kindhearted old woman, a sick young girl on a commuter train who feeds Cash sandwiches, a nice-guy cop, and some trouble-making teenagers. We also get a few acts of implausibly well-timed heroism from the dog that succeed in changing many folks’ minds about pit bulls.

There’s nothing wrong with putting a kids’ book in the service of an (ahem) pet issue, but the trouble with Dog Lost is that the pro-pit bull propaganda is so fierce that it muzzles any real sense of adventure. In an effort to cover all the possible angles, Lee includes enough characters and subplots to fill a 19th-century Russian novel. Also, the book’s prose style seems aimed at the lower end of its targeted age range, while most of the issues and situations in the book will only be comprehensible to those at or above the upper end. (For example, do many nine-year-olds want to read about teenagers throwing up and passing out in a car?)