Book Reviews by Title

I did not enjoy There Is No Dog. There were several things that I found wrong with it. But first, a quick summary of the book. There is a world of gods and goddesses who create worlds from planets. When this world couldn't find someone to take care of Earth, they stuck the job of God with the obnoxious teenage boy Simon. An older, more experienced god called Mr. B wanted the job, but the other gods didn't think he would be the greatest at it, so he becomes Simon's assistant more like his babysitter. But there were some big flaws to the book. For one, the characters were very unrealistic. I didn't feel their emotion ups and downs. I wasn't sad when they were sad, or happy when they were happy. The characters seemed very fake. Another thing that I didn't like in the story was how some characters, like Estelle, served no purpose in the story. They didn't add anything to the story at all. They seemed to have been half-haphazardly thrown into the mix of characters just to add some variety. One major thing that I didn't like was the happy ending our main character, Simon, got. Simon was greedy, rude, selfish, and in all ways unlikable. That's okay in some stories, like Enter Title Here, where instead of a happy ending the character got a quiet, not-as-great-as-she-wanted sort of ending, but with a slight change of character as well. But in this book, the hard-working Mr. B who puts up with Simon's tantrums, gets a promotion to a nice, established planet that he deserves, only to discover that the letter was actually addressed to Simon, who is delighted. What kind of message is this book trying to send? That the awful, greedy character gets the happy ending and the hard-working one gets the not-so-happy-ending? That ending irked me. But a final, final, problem about this book was how sharply the book ended. It didn't offer any kind of closure, and it didn't tie up remaining questions. For one, what happens to Eck? Is he eaten? Is he saved? Did Simon end up saving the whales? If so, how? Did he and Estelle work things out? What about the promotion? Does Simon actually go there? Does Mr. B stay on Earth? There was to many unanswered questions that this book ended with, and I did not enjoy it. Overall, the book was awful and I would not recommend it to anyone.