The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Format: Hardcover

Category:

A book in the backlist of a favorite author- #mmdchallenge (Modern Mrs Darcy)

"I once had a book on the stars but now I don't. My memory serves but not stellar, ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about." 

     I read Peter Heller's newest novel, The River, for the #mmdchallenge (a book by an author who is new to you), and it was so good that I named Heller a new favorite author of mine. I had great expectations for The Dog Stars, and it did not disappoint. This is a post-apocalyptic novel with an elegeic tone. The reading experience, for me, was much like swimming in an ocean. The terse writing style with it's fragmented sentences and lack of quotation marks threw me off at first, but I quickly adjusted, and began to appreciate these choppy waves and how they are indicative of the broken and anarchistic post-apocalyptic world that Hig and his dog, Jasper, are forced to navigate. This novel has so many ups and downs, waves of beauty and ugliness, violence and tenderness, desolation and hope, grief and joy. At times, it is disorienting and jarring, at others, comforting and calming. Despite some of the brutal content, this is ultimately a story of hope. There were some great twists, and I was not able to predict what would happen next with Hig and Jasper on their quest for survival. What I didn't like about it was the long-winded descriptions of fishing, and some explicit content.

CAWPILE Rating:

C- 9
A- 10
W- 9
P- 7
I- 8
L- 8
E- 8
Avg- 8.3 = ⭐⭐⭐⭐