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A review by booksinblossom
Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu
3.0
2,5*
Dogs of Summer is a tale about two inseparable friends which paints a real and awkward picture of girlhood, sexuality and friendships. The nine-year-old narrator is known to us only as Shit - a pet name given to her by her best friend Isora, a fearless young girl who tries to explore all kinds of boundaries. Together, Shit and Isora wander the streets, shooing away the neighborhood's many pitiful dogs, dreaming of being skinny and to go to the beach, passing the time doing nothing. Over the course of the summer vacation the narrator's simmering love for her friend erupts into a painful sexual awakening, just as Isora begins to heed the first calls of womanhood. Shit tries to keep up with her, but learns that growing up is a path one must walk alone.
I really wanted to like this book: a queer story about friendship and desire, translated by Julia Sanches and (as the cover promised) sentences like Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds 'The Discomfort of Evening'. Although not badly written, it didn't surprise me. The overall plot barely had much going on (which wouldn't be a problem if the atmosphere and language in the book would've grasped me), until the final act. This book is trying hard to be edgy and experimental, and although it is well tried and conceived, the story ends up being a bit boring. This was a good 'in-between-book', which i read while train traveling the whole day.
"We'd be grinding on things ever since we were small. In the summer, when there wasn't much to do, we grinded more and more often. We used clothes, pegs to touch ourselves over the cut-off sweatshorts we wore in the summer. When we drew, we slipped crayons under out panties and when we played with Babybjörns we slipped to dolls under too. We touched ourselves with Barbie heads and with Barbie hair and then everything smelled of minky, of those itsy crabs that skitter across the rocks, of salt water that dries in puddles and forms a gross crust that's hard like a slab of concrete. Sometimes we got merker stains all over our clothes and our pens would explode, but we carried on grinding and grinding until we'd finished, we always held out until we finished. Then we'd have to come up with an excuse to give our mothers (...) Isora always made me pray when we finished grinding and I went psspsspsspss with my sweatshorts streaked in colours, like a rainbow between my thighs, like a rainbow that rose up above the ocean, all the way down there, where the clouds mixed with the sea and everything was grey, and then it was just our minkies left, throbbing like a pair of blackbird hearts buried in the earth, like a forest about to burst into flower n the center of the Earth."
Dogs of Summer is a tale about two inseparable friends which paints a real and awkward picture of girlhood, sexuality and friendships. The nine-year-old narrator is known to us only as Shit - a pet name given to her by her best friend Isora, a fearless young girl who tries to explore all kinds of boundaries. Together, Shit and Isora wander the streets, shooing away the neighborhood's many pitiful dogs, dreaming of being skinny and to go to the beach, passing the time doing nothing. Over the course of the summer vacation the narrator's simmering love for her friend erupts into a painful sexual awakening, just as Isora begins to heed the first calls of womanhood. Shit tries to keep up with her, but learns that growing up is a path one must walk alone.
I really wanted to like this book: a queer story about friendship and desire, translated by Julia Sanches and (as the cover promised) sentences like Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds 'The Discomfort of Evening'. Although not badly written, it didn't surprise me. The overall plot barely had much going on (which wouldn't be a problem if the atmosphere and language in the book would've grasped me), until the final act. This book is trying hard to be edgy and experimental, and although it is well tried and conceived, the story ends up being a bit boring. This was a good 'in-between-book', which i read while train traveling the whole day.
"We'd be grinding on things ever since we were small. In the summer, when there wasn't much to do, we grinded more and more often. We used clothes, pegs to touch ourselves over the cut-off sweatshorts we wore in the summer. When we drew, we slipped crayons under out panties and when we played with Babybjörns we slipped to dolls under too. We touched ourselves with Barbie heads and with Barbie hair and then everything smelled of minky, of those itsy crabs that skitter across the rocks, of salt water that dries in puddles and forms a gross crust that's hard like a slab of concrete. Sometimes we got merker stains all over our clothes and our pens would explode, but we carried on grinding and grinding until we'd finished, we always held out until we finished. Then we'd have to come up with an excuse to give our mothers (...) Isora always made me pray when we finished grinding and I went psspsspsspss with my sweatshorts streaked in colours, like a rainbow between my thighs, like a rainbow that rose up above the ocean, all the way down there, where the clouds mixed with the sea and everything was grey, and then it was just our minkies left, throbbing like a pair of blackbird hearts buried in the earth, like a forest about to burst into flower n the center of the Earth."