The Ordinary Life of an (Extra) Ordinary Dog - A Memoir

A Bittersweet Look At One Dog's Life

This is hard to rate, because I'm a big ol' softie when it comes to anything about the impact a dog's love can have on someone's life. I feel guilty only giving three stars, but I can't pretend this is the easiest book to get through or the best writing I've read.

Told like a series of incredibly brief blog posts, this memoir of sorts follows the author's journey with a sweet dog named Tucker. Rescued from neglect, raised with doting love, and cherished until the very end, Tucker's long life brought much joy to Colette Makray's life. And in this book, she shares a few bits and pieces of the life journey they had together.

It's sweet then bittersweet, and heartwarming then sad. You can tell when the grief starts to hit again during the writing process, and sadly that also has an impact on the quality of sentence structure. Like I said: it's very blog-style: informal, swift, with timeskips that aren't always clearly announced.

I enjoyed seeing pictures of Tucker and some of the tales of his adventures. My heart ached with empathy, but not as much as I'd anticipated - perhaps because everything breezes by so quickly.

I'm glad I got a glimpse of Tucker, and I'm glad I read this, but I don't think it quite lives up to what it could have been. I'm also confused by the choice of cover, because the dog on it doesn't seem to look much like the photos within.

Don't read this if you don't want to handle stories in which real life dogs die at the end. Well, one real dog. And it's the entire point of the memoir, so you probably know what's coming just as I did. But just in case, yeah?