All about me

I wanted to love this book, I really did. I was ready to love this book. I love dogs. But I didn't love this book. I didn't even like it. Something was missing for me. It had none of the charm that books like Marley and Me have. I know that Garth Stein was trying to tell it from the dogs perspective which is admirable. But he didn't compensate for the resulting lack of context in relation to the history of relationships between the characters. As a result the in-laws are so inextricably bad as to be rendered stereotypical. And the extreme anthropomorphising was a bit hard to take. I expected to get some idea of how the author conceptualised how a dog might see us.

I think what I found most difficult was that the method of the narration stripped the dog of his canineness and turned him into a human male with four legs, a tail but without the power of speech. And this masculinisation relied on stereotyped views of the world such as the poor tortured man wrongfully accused of sexual assault by a calculating and spurned woman (bearing in mind that most recent research indicates that only 3% of sexual assault allegations are knowingly false, such remoteness from usual human experience makes it difficult to maintain suspension of disbelief). The human characters were by and large two dimensional. It just didn't do it for me.