Author: Susan Lash (no website found)
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
"but I am going to make popcorn," "Come on Albert." It seems that there needs to be an action in there, or the first half of the speech needs to be added to the previous speech (the one which did come before an action).
"He pushed his head under my arm with his head under my hand" (end of chapter 15) really doesn't make sense! Was it supposed to be something like, "He pushed his nose under my hand and worked his head under my arm" perhaps?
"German Sheppard" should be "German shepherd"
It’s hard to tell at what age range this novel is aimed. We're given the narrator, Jennifer Huckabee's age, which is actually twelve, but the writing is a bit lower on the scale than that. The novel is about your standard American family: Mom, Dad, one older boy, one younger girl, and the addition of one Jack Russell terrier which causes entirely predictable problems, most of which are the result not of the dog's antics but of the other characters' complete inability to show any evidence of smarts.
Despite that, it does have funny bits and will probably appeal to readers who are somewhere below the age range of the main character - and preferably male based on the humor. There's an amusing story when grandma comes to visit. She drives a British car which has the steering wheel on the right, so when she takes the kids for a drive, she sits the dog on a booster seat up front so it looks like he's driving the car. That was it for the humor.
There's very little descriptive prose - only enough to indicate getting from A to B, or to briefly describe a situation caused by the dog. The rest of it was all conversation, so it felt like a really odd kind of a read to me - like the author had made a list of funny things she could write about and then simply connected them as quickly as she could, filled in some conversation, and left it at that. It didn’t feel crafted at all.
In the end, I read that the author evidently based this on real events, so my early surmise was pretty much right on the money! The text felt really sparse, and not in a good way. There was very little to the characters, none of whom had a life outside of their relationship to the dog's antics. This didn't even get close to entertaining me, and I doubt either of my kids would be interested in it.
I have to say that there were some illogicalities here, too. Not that novels can't have them by any means, but I don’t know this writer and I found myself wondering sometimes about her choices, which detracted from the story. I can understand that a son having a dog and his sister being expected to baby-sit it and clean up after it would be a useful cause of friction, but this isn’t how it’s written. Once in a while that happens and we're shown how unjust it is, but sometimes the other side of the coin turns up, and there's no balancing observation.
For example, when Jenny's friend stops by and proceeds to stuff the dog with carrots, and it throws up on the kitchen floor, Jack is expected to clean up. It's really Jenny's friend's fault, but this fact isn’t raised at all, so we're given no sense of the injustice done to Jack here. At least a mention would have been nice. That was a big problem in this novel: there was no moral compass! There were no lessons imparted with regard to pet care or to getting-along with your peers. There was nothing delivered about the consequences of irresponsible behavior. Reading this felt like watching a bad Disney live-action movie from the fifties.
It would have been a better story had there been a little more going on in the main character's life, but there wasn't. Not ever! Her entire life consisted of homework and watching TV - and then her entire life started revolving around the dog. That was all she had. It's hardly surprising that she had chronically low self-esteem, but rather than show us how she overcame this, this author took the lazy way out and brought a guy into her life to validate her, thereby betraying all independent and strong girls everywhere.
Then there was the startlingly abrupt ending - like someone got bored with it and just turned it off like a TV - which actually was fine with me. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.
