Customer Reviews

Dogland

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An avid reader, I can nonetheless say this is the most rewarding book I've read in quite some time. From the book jacket description, I expected a simple tale about a family establishing a tourist attraction. What I got, however, was an enormously rich and complex look at race relations in the American South at the beginning of the 1960s. The narrator, an adult retelling events perceived as a child, presents the story in a magical way that is innocent and yet wise. The rest of the ensemble are as skillfully drawn; no character is entirely black or white (in terms of character or race), rendering them believable and thought-provoking. It's not every day one finds an author with the ability to develop such characters.

Issues are introduced by events that are conveyed in just enough detail to make you put the book down for a while and consider them. Add to that a hint of fantasy and supernatural, and you're left with a book that leads your mind beyond the boundaries of its covers. As I read the last page, my first instinct was to turn the book over and begin reading it again.

I read about half of this 400+ page book in one day. (It was September 11, 2001, which should give you a hint about why.) This is that kind of absorbing work. It's about passages and transformations. A naturally-selfish and self-absorbed four-year-old becomes a slightly-less-so seven year old. A possible or actual affair tears a family apart, before it is tenously drawn back together. The time-bomb Eisenhower era ticks into the explosive sixties. And those who hate change lash out. Meanwhile, dieties and devils drift through the text, sometimes identifiable, sometimes not. (This is a good book to read with Gaiman's "American Gods" -- some of the same "characters" show up in both books.) And it's all told with the kind of simple-yet-beautiful prose that's the hardest kind of writing to pull off. The story is worth reading just to meet the best character, Luke Nix -- a dreamer yet a gritty realist, an unfair tyrant of a father yet a man of breathtaking courage and conviction. Read it if you want to get away for a while.

This book can be read on so many levels. You have the coming-of-age story, which alone would make the book worthwhile, but delicately introduced (and so subtly that many will probably miss it on the first read) is the element of magic. Will Shetterly is an excellent writer, and this is his masterwork.

My husband and I found this book to be excellent. The characters have a lot of depth and complexity and the historical perspective is great. Telling the story from a child's point of view was very interesting and not "childish". The children reminded me of kids growing up on a farm who learn to be independent and responsible at an early age. A riveting read.

This book was nothing like I expected, yet I still kept reading. I got it as a free e-book from Tor.

I was never really sure what genre this was in. It read like a sort of memoir, but there were hints of magic realism or fantasy here and there that kept throwing me off, making me expect something that never materialized. The beginning and ending didn't match up for me either. Finally, I was often thrown out of the story by the narrator's precise recollections from when he was a four year old. That just felt too improbable to me for a memoir.

Setting: Mostly Florida, with some Minnesota thrown in, during the 1960s (if I remember correctly). The story revolves around the roadside cafe and museum that the family built and ran.

Plot: Not much I could point out here really since it is more what happened in chronological order. There doesn't seem to be much unifying or cohesive about the story except for the setting.

Conflict: The most interesting part of the book was how the author dealt with bigotry and segregation of blacks. It was definitely impressive for me to read about what blacks went through and what they had to endure from ignorant and stubborn whites. Other than that, there was just typical young boy conflict stuff.

Characters: The author did a good job of making even the racists (at least a few of them) seem more human. It would have been easy to demonize them, but the author showed the complexity here well.

Well...first of all I would like to inform you that I am a young teenager (13) and that this is my mother's amazon account. But, I absolutly enjoyed this book. I thought Mr. Shetterly did an excellent job with creating his characters. No matter how minor a role they had in his book, they were all very well developed. I do think that some parts in Dogland were a little slow, bit to descriptive and a little to wordy for my taste, but I can be quite picky. I also thought that while supplying a more historical theme, this book piqued my interested by adding a touch of fantasy. All in all, I must give major props to Mr. Shetterly for writing a very good book that gave me a peek into life in the predjudice 1950's south while holding my interest!

A great story with memorable characters. Details about growing up in Florida in the late 50s-early 60s rang true.

I do not know if I did not like this book because of the slow pace or because of the view point all being from a small boy. I bought it after being told it was urban fantasy, with similar style to the Borderland short story series and Charles de Lint. Utterly wrong. Go read a Charles de Lint book or Tanya Huff instead.

The strong point of this book is the believability of the main characters, as well as its lyrical language. I found the protagonist and his parents to be especially well drawn, and the conflict between the protagonist, a young boy, and his father to be credible. However, this book just didn't seem to go anywhere. I needed some significant plot, and it wasn't in evidence at all. I was hoping the boy would learn something growing up, but he didn't that I could tell.

This is another boonie dog book review by Wolfie and Kansas. The title of Will Shetterly's novel "Dogland" refers to a tourist attraction in early 1960's Florida, a sort of dog zoo where tourists can view several dozen breeds of dogs. Given this title, we expected a canicentric plot. Unfortunately, for about ninety percent of the book, Dogland may as well have been Pet Rock Land. Even minor human characters were developed far more fully than any of the dogs.

Instead of being a dog story, "Dogland" is yet another coming-of-age tale about a human puppy. While we boonie dogs are not thrilled about this genre, this once we are kind of glad that the author used a doggish title to get this book into our paws. Shetterly made the time, place, and human characters interesting enough to hold our attention until the dogs at long last took center stage.