The World Through Someone Else’s Eyes: A Guest Post by Ross Montgomery

By Ross Montgomery / November 13, 2025 at 8:00 am

An inspirational tale of courage, loyalty and hope, I Am Rebel follows one pooch’s impossible journey across battlefields. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Ross Montgomery on writing one of our 2025 Children’s Books of the Year, I Am Rebel.

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I Am Rebel (B&N Exclusive Edition) (2025 B&N Children's Book of the Year)

By Ross Montgomery

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Paperback $9.99

This Barnes and Noble Exclusive Edition features a special cover and bonus author letter!

The Letter for the King meets The Incredible Journey in this story of one dog’s quest to save the human he loves.

I love writing in the first person, where you have a chance to show the reader the world through someone else’s eyes. But I AM REBEL was the very first time that I’d written from the perspective of a dog. I wanted to make sure that if I was going to do it, I did it in a way that felt right… after all, I wouldn’t have any dogs writing to me afterwards to explain what I got wrong.

My first choice was to write the book in the present tense. Dogs live in the moment: they don’t fret about the past or worry about the future, they take each moment as it comes and they revel in it. This is why they find it so hard to control themselves when, say, their owner’s sandwich is dangling mere inches from their nose. They might know it’ll get them in trouble, they might even remember how much trouble they got in the last ten times it happened… but they can’t help themselves. Having the sandwich RIGHT NOW is more important than whatever future punishment might lie in store.

The second decision I made was that I wanted the prose to be packed full of sensory description. A dog’s nose is ten thousand times more powerful than ours: they can smell things we can’t smell, taste things we can’t taste, hear things we can’t hear. To a dog, the world is full of sensations: maybe that’s why the sandwich is so hard to ignore. To Rebel, the world would be so alive with sensation that it would be a living, breathing thing: almost another animal that he lives alongside. That’s why the morning sunlight “pokes its nose through the curtains”, and the wind from the mountains “runs its fingers through his fur”… Again, it just felt right to me.

Last of all, I wanted to give Rebel a distinct personality. I didn’t want him to be blindly loyal to his owner Tom, simply because he’s a dog, and that’s what dogs are meant to do. Rebel might not be big, and he might not be strong, and he might not be very smart, but his loyalty – his ability to love – is what leads him to achieve amazing things.