Customer Reviews

Dog People

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This complex and brutal novel is among Mazza's best work. With a point of view that moves seamlessly from character to character and visceral, gripping language, "Dog People" offers readers a provocative and compelling window into the human condition. These emotionally stunted characters make paltry offerings of friendship and love and, vis a vis their failure to connect with one another, the very nature of human relationships is subtly interrogated. Human-human bonds of friendship and love are deconstructed, Mazza seems to suggest, by humanity's own failure to live up to the constructs it designs. Love and friendship and marriage do not and can not exist as we might want them to, and our bonds with one another are elusive at best and brutally damaging at worst. In relationships with animals, however, even the most flawed human heart can function with purity. This book stings and shimmers, touches and wounds. It invokes the inevitabilities of both isolation and our desperate, inefficacious struggles against it.

Fans of Mazza's gritty, heart-stopping prose in "Your Name Here" and "Is It Sexual Harrassment Yet?" will revel in "Dog People."

Writing is good, story is so-so. I certainly hope that no one thinks that these "dog people" know what the hell they are doing, because they don't. Lots of ideas that go nowhere in particular.

Probably wouldn't be so critical if I weren't a REAL Dog Person.

Part soap opera, part social commentary, this book as engrossing as any Aaron Spelling creation, but also engages the brain. Since when are midlist novels page-turners? Since now. This is indulgence without the guilt. This is a gripping plot without any lawyers or murderers -- just six characters treating each other like dogs, treating their dogs like people, mating, dating, relating. The most amazing scene -- when a woman and her husband -- was she forcing herself on him? I'm not sure. It was intense. Dancers and great danes. Lesbians and Labrador retrievers. Put a collar on it and take it home.

Fanny and the rest of the characters in Dog People stayed with me after I turned the last page. This book was just plain fun to read. The characters are flawed, needy and difficult. Their extreme emotions and actions are intense and strange yet Mazza makes it easy to identify with every word they speak and every action they take. The story just kept building in intensity to the very satisfying end. I cared about Fanny and wanted her to be successful in her journey toward self awareness. The interplay between canines and humans was great.

[...] I cannot put into words how pompous and poorly written this is. I cannot believe this abomination could be published, and that this "writer" is actually a professor at UIC. God help us all...