The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
My rating: 3/5 cats
hey, amazon! you watchin’ all these reviews now?? making sure they are all sunshiny five-starcat gushings that won’t hurt the authors’ feelings and cost you a sale?? making sure i don’t drop any naughty words?
well, i can’t five-star cat this book, so i guess i am writing this for nothing, and it might get deleted in the “every book is a winner” mentality of your book-worldview.
but i am gonna write it anyway, in the hopes that goodreads.com can still be the place it should be—where people can have opinions about books that are about books, and not as a means to move product.
this book is fine.
fine is not a bad thing, amazon.
for me, who has read a lot of post-apoc fiction, it just seems very familiar. disaster (superflu) causes mass death, people who are left face questionable moral decisions while still yearning for community. (but, amazon, you will appreciate all the PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!! COKE!! SPRITE!! DR PEPPER!!$$$)
our hero is a pilot named hig who has a dog named jasper. they have joined forces with a typical gun-loving bigot named bangley, and with hig’s aeronautical abilities and bangley’s killing-proficiency, they have forged a partnership, living on an airfield, where they can feel (relatively) safe from marauders and others who would try to encroach on their territory, with its functioning garden and water supply.
and, naturally, in these troubled times, everyone left is a potential threat, and sometimes bangley kills people that hig would prefer not be killed. women. children. people just looking for shelter.
it’s survival of the fittest, but it’s imperfect.
and it works for a while—years—until something happens that makes hig want a change of scenery. hig is still trying to be a good man in a world that doesn’t really reward the good man, but he takes his plane and goes on a journey. and whether this is man’s search for meaning or a suicide attempt is totally your call.
this is probably not a huge spoiler, but i am going to spoiler-tag it anyway, for courtesy. look amazon, we has spoiler tags over here—jealous? View Spoiler »
no, no, amazon, i wasn’t talking about you, don’t worry.
View Spoiler »so, yeah. i think if i hadn’t read like a ton of other, more interesting-to-me aftermath novels, i probably would have rated this higher. it has some really beautiful moments in it, and every scene with hig and jasper is just tender and sweet and only occasionally cloying. i liked large swathes of it, particularly his memories of his wife in better days.
but after all is said and done, it remains “fine” to me.
no, amazon, i would not like to buy this book, i got it from the LIBRARY!
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