Good Boy is the story of transgender woman Jennifer Finney Boylan, and the lessons she learned by loving seven different dogs at various points in her life. The memoir moves forwards and backwards in time to her life before and after transition and how she was affected at various points by the people she loved. She denotes these different periods in her life by discussing the dogs she had during each and how they played a role in shaping who she would become.
I found Good Boy to be a very well-written novel. The writing is smart, funny, sarcastic, and honest. I definitely got a sense of Jenny and the life she lived in reading this memoir.
That being said, there were some things that made reading the book a little difficult. The jumps in time happen with little to no warning, and a single moment can be jumped in and out of across several pages, making it difficult to figure out what is happening and where in time a moment in the narrative actually is. While this structure works well with the genre of this work, it does make it really hard to follow along with Jenny and which part of her life is actually being described. I also found myself trudging through the book, rather than excitedly turning pages. There were definitely great insights offered about love, life, and dogs, but I struggled to get into this book and to finish it.
I had certain expectations about what looking through life via the lens of the dogs Jenny had would look like, and found that they more loosely shaped the narrative than acted as the central structure for it. There is a lot of weaving back and forth to tie each of the dogs into the lessons they taught, and I don't think this was always done in a way that was effective. The book was far less dog-focused than I wanted it to be.
All in all, the writing was strong, and the work was informative and insightful, but I didn't consider it a particularly fun or exciting read. I also don't think the book does what it said it would.
I found Good Boy to be a very well-written novel. The writing is smart, funny, sarcastic, and honest. I definitely got a sense of Jenny and the life she lived in reading this memoir.
That being said, there were some things that made reading the book a little difficult. The jumps in time happen with little to no warning, and a single moment can be jumped in and out of across several pages, making it difficult to figure out what is happening and where in time a moment in the narrative actually is. While this structure works well with the genre of this work, it does make it really hard to follow along with Jenny and which part of her life is actually being described. I also found myself trudging through the book, rather than excitedly turning pages. There were definitely great insights offered about love, life, and dogs, but I struggled to get into this book and to finish it.
I had certain expectations about what looking through life via the lens of the dogs Jenny had would look like, and found that they more loosely shaped the narrative than acted as the central structure for it. There is a lot of weaving back and forth to tie each of the dogs into the lessons they taught, and I don't think this was always done in a way that was effective. The book was far less dog-focused than I wanted it to be.
All in all, the writing was strong, and the work was informative and insightful, but I didn't consider it a particularly fun or exciting read. I also don't think the book does what it said it would.