OK, the good news: Joel Froomkin is even better than his usual excellent performing Doug the pug. Doug is a wonderful character and Joel just makes him shine. Joel is always a brilliant narrator, possessed of every voice you can imagine – his women are particularly wonderful – and his characterizations of the side characters here, especially Julie’s father and BFF, are nuanced and distinctive and clever and funny and memorable.
The bad news: my god, the female lead is awful. Whiny, annoying, and endlessly obsessed with her married lover who is playing her as obviously as humanly possible, self-righteously justifying her affair with him, Julie’s the kind of person whose calls I’d stop taking after a while. She doesn’t deserve Doug, or her smart, loyal best friend, and lord knows I cannot figure out what on earth Tom sees in her. I kept waiting for her to experience some growth, or for her positive qualities to emerge, and it never happened. Her relationship with Tom is hard to believe in a number of respects. He has a strong reason to dislike her and why he instead starts courting her is inexplicable. Their banter feels strange, as she pokes at him when barely knowing him and it’s not as cute as she thinks it is. I finished this book annoyed that I’d wasted time on it, and wishing Doug had an owner who wasn’t an oblivious, self-deluding idiot.