Dogchild by Kevin Brooks
Published: 2020 by Candlewick Press
Genre(s): Young Adult, Dystopian
Pages: 480
Format: E-Galley
ISBN: 9781536209747
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Thank you to both Netgalley and Candlewick Press for providing me a copy of this in exchange for an honest review!
It took me a long, long time to read this and although I tried hard to push through, I couldn’t bring myself to finish this book.
There’s a combination of things that had me ultimately giving up on reading this:
1. The pacing is steady but also incredibly slow. The action scenes could’ve been breaths of fresh air (used to keep readers on their toes), but lengthy explanations of those moments just kept everything slow.
2. Although I’m intrigue by the way the story is written, it also made it harder to read. This could be formatting errors in the e-galley provided, or it could be on purpose. Either way, the “hede”, em dashes and the general lack of quotation marks to mark which phrase is a dialogue required so much energy for me to decipher what is what, that I was just too exhausted to read more than a few pages each time.
3. I was also expecting the narrative to sound more young adult than middle grade so this kind of threw me off.
4. The romance also feels out of place and there’s a number of decisions made that had me going ???
Despite the above, I really love the premise. I honestly would’ve read this book till the end—even with the slow pacing, the questionable moments, out-of-place romance and the middle grade tone still in place. It’s just the way the story was executed bogged me down the most.
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