Boukhili Aymen Aymen থেকে Krasnosilka, Khmel'nyts'ka oblast, Ukraine
** spoiler alert ** I'd been resisting reading one of these dog narrator books for several reasons: 1) It's a stupid phase, like those talking animal movies that exploded in the 90's. 2) Who wants to read a book where the narrator is going to get you attached to them and then die? That's not only like walking right into a punch in the gut but putting yourself on a three month waiting list to get to one. 3) If you tell me something different than a person is a narrator I'm going to hold you to it so you better do it so amazingly well that I shut the hell up. Don't get me wrong, I am really good at suspending my belief for pretty much everything. One of the reasons I like action movies so much is that they allow me to think that Bruch Willis can do whatever he goddamn pleases and get away with it. For this book, I could not believe for a second that this narrator was a dog. Before people who love this book scream at me that the point was that he was mostly like a human anyways, I want you to a) smack yourself and b) think about this a minute. 1) This dog repeats himself a lot, he especially likes the phrase "I am a dog." Okay, so you're a dog. A dog who tells and doesn't show but whatever, let's go with it. 2) Since this dog is a dog, why does he give a shit about if something is non-hydrogenated? Or if the food that his humans eat is hurting the environment? This dog must have been Captain Planet in his previous life, since he's all about reincarnation. It brought up an interesting hypocrisy in this book at least. The dead wife had a midwife for her home birth. She refuses medical attention until the last minute, when it's absolutely necessary, causing a sort of unnecessary drama for this book but it's because she's distrustful of the machine that is modern medicine. They live in Seattle and do trendy environmentalist things, which I'm totally not knocking in any way. More power to them. But then the dude drives race cars. While the dog brings up Paul Newman and his race car team and how they're environmentally conscious (because dogs know these things, I'm sure there's a Paul Newman special somewhere on cable right now)- he doesn't establish that his hippie earth loving owner does anything special to save the world with his race car. Just that he races in it and flys in an airplane (super Earth smart, I'm sure) all over the world to race. Honestly, I wouldn't have a problem with this or even notice it if it weren't such a glaring contradiction and happening every other page. I mean, why even bring up environmental stuff in a book about racing cars? Just leave it alone and then bitchy jerks like me won't have anything to notice or say. 3) The dog brings up that nobody ever taught him to read (because he's a dog. They should have replaced the periods in this book with "I'm a dog" or "because I'm a dog") and yet later on he brings up how people are like letters. One lawyer is like the letter B. The next lawyer is like the letter L. Good thing letters and words that start with those same letters have nothing to do with reading! Otherwise that would make this narrator not a dog. I mean, there were a lot of parts where I was like, okay this contradicts that. Or something contradicted the narrator being a dog. What happened (and I feel like I complain about this a lot, so stop me if you've head this one) is that the author got too smart for himself. He took this gimmick of the dog narrator and cashed in on whatever sensational value it's holding with the public but then tried to get really smart (and kind of preachy) with it and he shot himself in the foot. Yes there are really intelligent dogs out there. Yes they are super cool and you almost think they're a person. I don't think they're going to judge you when you don't use the biodegradable poop bags. While I wanted to give this book one star and not even finish it, it did choke me up in a couple of places. Mostly at places about the dead wife. The ending had absolutely no emotional effect on me. The only thing I thought was "why is it taking so long for this dog to die already, geez." So I guess my reason for not wanting to read a book where you get attached to the narrator was all for naught since I felt absolutely no attachment to this non-dog narrator.