A review by bravokidroxy
A Man of His Own by Susan Wilson

2.0

This was a very fast read and very light. There are more serious themes that are touched on: PTSD, grief and guilt, abuse and neglect but they feel only surface deep. The POV changes every chapter which to me is jarring especially since the tense and maybe even the narrative style shift too, I really wanted this book to be ‘written’ by the dog but it’s not so that was an immediate let down. I should also mention that there are some date tags that give a structured timeline to the story both in narrative and in the part break pages but even with those I felt like lots of the story was almost timeless in that it could have been literally any-when. There was a very slow burn on a revel that the readers been in on the whole time but the characters only find out at the end of the second part, I wish there had been more explosion with that, the scene ends up as a quiet, solitary “oh-no” moment and that was unsatisfying and then the time jump between part 2 and part 3 seems real after thought-y, like the story that needed to be told, had come out but there was nothing tied up neatly, so we added a chapter or two and called it part three to make the Mass Market Paperback market happy.

End piece I guess it was a book and it’s got lots of good dog bits but I just wanted more out of it.