Can't go wrong? Men and Dogs.

August 6, 2013

Dear Readers,

Here is a review I just posted on Goodreads and Amazon. The book is by the New York Times Best Selling author, Katie Crouch whose best seller was Girls in Trucks. This book is named Men and Dogs. 

I was having lunch with a group of friends last week, and one of the ladies gave me a book she’d discovered for a dollar. For only a dollar she’d figured she couldn’t go wrong, and when I took it out of her hand, my thought was; free, how could I go wrong?

The jacket verbiage informs the would-be reader that the story is about the heroine and her efforts to find out what really happened to her father when he disappeared while on a fishing trip with the family dog, two decades earlier.

We are taken through memories of a dysfunctional childhood, memories far too long left unquestioned and unresolved. The author is going to share the trials and discoveries of Hannah, our protagonist, on her trip of discovery and healing. Ok that sounds good, should be entertaining. 

What I noticed from the very first line, is the authors penchant for writing sentences that are very staccato. I felt like I was marching in step through the pages. For me as a reader, there is a big difference between cleanly constructed sentences and chopped robotic lines. It felt like the editor had gone through and cut out all the fat. Advising the author not to use so many conjunctions! I can imagine the advise; "Use the find function in Microsoft word and see how many times you’ve used as and was."

Then there were sentences that ground at me like a fingernail on a chalkboard. Example; “Hannah, now thirty-five, remembers some details perfectly clearly…….” Perfectly clearly?

Or the following; “You broke a rib and fractured your skull slightly.” Slightly? Is that like being sorta pregnant?

 

This wasn’t a terrible book, but I can see why it was a dollar.

Take care,
Shelley Riley
www.shelleyriley.com