Review: Dogs are great, BUT...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 26, 2011
This one kept me up late reading. The story flowed smoothly, for the most part. The characters had--again, for the most part--depth and emotion. I felt connected to these people and wanted to find out what happens to them. I thought the plot was believable, overall. The writing was solid.I nearly stopped reading this book after the first chapter. The blatant anthropomorphism of the dog's point-of-view in an unbelievable way was a huge turn-off. I like dogs, don't get me wrong. I have two dogs. I like a heroic dog character. I believe the dog could/would do everything described in the book. But giving the dog human feelings and thought processes went too far. However, I always finish the sample, at least, and as soon as we switched to humans I was hooked. Subsequently, I wanted to skip over all the dog POV parts, but I was afraid I'd miss something I would need to know, so I was forced to read them. The book lost a star from me for that.I kept thinking that it was too huge a coincidence that Martin came out of his isolation experiment conveniently immune to a virus that killed nearly everyone else on the planet.I also didn't find it very believable that NO ONE TOLD HIM the entire population was dying out while he was down there. It's not like they had to worry about losing their funding for interrupting the experiment... But that's a small quibble.My final quibble is that I didn't think the parts about Diaz added anything to the book. He was a good character, but his parts were jumps away from the main story and were distracting to me. He's good enough for his own story, I'd think. Maybe something short.I was glad that two of the early characters didn't show up again toward the end, which is a trap too many writers fall into. The book had plenty of twists and turns without that.On the whole, well worth the read.