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cmbrown4's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Murder, Violence, and Animal death
jannak's review
3.0
I'd give this one star for writing style (no quotation marks, split sentences, hard to follow), but four stars for the plot (post-apocalyptic life spent searching for a semblance of the past).
brookebatesratesbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Cursing, Murder, and Death
Moderate: Sexual content
Minor: Animal death
mamatoca's review
Was not going to be a book club pick - swearing and really odd phrasing.
ambergamgee's review
3.0
2.5 stars. This is now my second book I’ve read of Peter Heller and...he really cannot write women well. I have a hard time believing that a doctor who has survived the apocalypse for 10 years would be screaming and groveling and hiding like a damsel in distress from a 1920s silent film. I liked the self indulgent descriptions of nature, I did not like how horny it got in the last 20%
mgsardina's review
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
oxnard_montalvo's review
2.0
Do you know what I find kind of annoying he looked into the distance and there was was. Stuff noone we didn't but back to my question. When there aren't any quotation marks.
And when sentences.
You get the idea.
But to give it kudos when kudos are due, there are some absorbing moments in this book- when Hig goes out to the woods, when he thinks back on his pre- apocalypse life with tenderness and aching sadness. Those parts are well rendered. The hasty action sequences less so. The whole ending left much to be desired. I wasn't sure what end it served.
A book I don't regret reading, but not one I would read again.
And when sentences.
You get the idea.
But to give it kudos when kudos are due, there are some absorbing moments in this book- when Hig goes out to the woods, when he thinks back on his pre- apocalypse life with tenderness and aching sadness. Those parts are well rendered. The hasty action sequences less so. The whole ending left much to be desired. I wasn't sure what end it served.
A book I don't regret reading, but not one I would read again.
grahamclements's review
3.0
When I first pulled Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars from the shelves of a bookstore I remember muttering a sarcastic “yeah right,” after I read a comment on its cover claiming it was “A novel about the end of the world which makes you glad to be alive.” That’s not the role of apocalyptic fiction, I thought. But after reading the novel’s blurb, I decided to give it a go.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, a decade after a virus has killed 99% of the population. Hig, a poet, handyman, gardener, fisherman, hunter and pilot along with his dog Jasper, share a small airfield with a Bangley, a gun-toting survivalist. They have nothing in common but need each other to survive. Hig uses his Cessna to make daily surveillance flights searching for marauding survivors, while Bangley uses his guns to kill them. All other survivors are deemed threats because Hig and Bangley both know what they had to do to survive.
So at the beginning of the book they are hard characters to like. But as the book progresses, and other survivors attack them, it becomes clear that their ruthless defence of the airfield is the only reason they have survived. Hig, Bangley and Jasper seemed destined to live out their lives together after successfully killing anyone who comes near. But then things change.
I found the story engrossing, but the authors writing continually interrupted the flow of the story. In particular his decision not to use quote marks to specify dialogue and not to use attributions annoyed me. I often had to re-read a passage to discover who, if anyone, had been speaking.
Peter Carey did the same thing in The True History of the Kelly Gang. But he is a much better writer than Peter Heller, as I never found myself asking if someone had just spoken. Carey also had a reason for his lack of dialogue signifiers as he was trying to emulate the absence of punctuation in a the Jerilderie letter, a letter dictated by Ned Kelly to Joe Bryne. I wonder why Peter Heller chose to forgo dialogue signifiers. It certainly did not add to the writing.
Another quirk with Heller’s writing is that he often had the same word twice in a row, for example: “They had seen enough, enough to flee, but not the full demise.” “Before before” was quite common.
By the end of The Dog Stars, the book had lived up to its front cover comment and instilled some hope for humanity into me. It is just a shame that Heller’s writing style damaged the flow of the story. It turned what could have been a really excellent novel, into one that is just good.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, a decade after a virus has killed 99% of the population. Hig, a poet, handyman, gardener, fisherman, hunter and pilot along with his dog Jasper, share a small airfield with a Bangley, a gun-toting survivalist. They have nothing in common but need each other to survive. Hig uses his Cessna to make daily surveillance flights searching for marauding survivors, while Bangley uses his guns to kill them. All other survivors are deemed threats because Hig and Bangley both know what they had to do to survive.
So at the beginning of the book they are hard characters to like. But as the book progresses, and other survivors attack them, it becomes clear that their ruthless defence of the airfield is the only reason they have survived. Hig, Bangley and Jasper seemed destined to live out their lives together after successfully killing anyone who comes near. But then things change.
I found the story engrossing, but the authors writing continually interrupted the flow of the story. In particular his decision not to use quote marks to specify dialogue and not to use attributions annoyed me. I often had to re-read a passage to discover who, if anyone, had been speaking.
Peter Carey did the same thing in The True History of the Kelly Gang. But he is a much better writer than Peter Heller, as I never found myself asking if someone had just spoken. Carey also had a reason for his lack of dialogue signifiers as he was trying to emulate the absence of punctuation in a the Jerilderie letter, a letter dictated by Ned Kelly to Joe Bryne. I wonder why Peter Heller chose to forgo dialogue signifiers. It certainly did not add to the writing.
Another quirk with Heller’s writing is that he often had the same word twice in a row, for example: “They had seen enough, enough to flee, but not the full demise.” “Before before” was quite common.
By the end of The Dog Stars, the book had lived up to its front cover comment and instilled some hope for humanity into me. It is just a shame that Heller’s writing style damaged the flow of the story. It turned what could have been a really excellent novel, into one that is just good.