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Rating:  -
I read a lot of books, about 20 per year. This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read; so much so, that I am writing my first review right now. Being a dog lover, a friend gave me this book. Enzo, the dog narrator, is loveable and logical and entertaining, in his observations of humankind. I'll be reading the other books by Stein.
Rating:  -
It's a good thing that the author chose the Dog, Enzo, as the narrator because Denny is a very unsympathetic character. He refused to help take care of his blind mother. He let his wife suffer for years from obvious symptoms of brain cancer. He beat his dog for going berzerk after having been locked up for three days without food. He let a fifteen year old girl seduce him.
I understand that race car drivers need to be selfish on the track but they shouldn't be selfish in real life.
Much of the book is likely the author trying to convince himself that he's a decent human being.
Rating: -
The dialogue was trite---he uses phrases such as "think outside the box"----if a novelist can't come up something more original and descriptive than that, then he's lost me immediately. The dialogue was also contrived---I found myself rolling my eyes at so much of it because it sounded so forced.
I couldn't have cared less about the characters; there wasn't enough development for me to care. The author spent WAY too much time including details that just didn't matter, as if he was trying to fill space. For example, I really didn't care that the daughter had "chips and the good cookies" in her lunch box. That was irrelevant----and annoying. In fact, much of the description of the daughter was annoying, as were much of the details of the racing scenes. They seemed contrived, and it was just too much; the author was obviously------and maybe that's the problem----that it was just too obvious---trying to use the racing scenes as metaphors for life. It didn't work for me; it was too forced.
The only reason that I didn't stop reading in the middle of the book and just donate it to charity was that I don't like starting something and then not finishing it. Was this book really a bestseller? I thought it was awful.
Rating:  -
Garth Stein's "The Art of Racing in the Rain" is a paean to man's best friend, the loyal, (unwittingly) quiet, loving and wise dog. Anyone who is an animal lover, and, in all likelihood, anyone with a heart, will be touched by this moving and funny book. Stein joins three unlikely topical bedfellows seamlessly: Formula 1 auto racing, a sentient dog, through whom the story is narrated, and a tug-at-the-heartstrings story of a family torn apart. Through Enzo the dog's sympathetic and observant eyes, the reader also watches helplessly, as certain events unfold in the story that are infuriating and unfair to the point of becoming enraging. Stein is a sensitive and yet pragmatic storyteller as the reader becomes engulfed with the same feelings of helplessness and frustration that Enzo feels as he watches the family around him fragment and separate. Anyone who has ever owned a pet has had the distinct belief that he/she understands exactly what we are saying, and that any behavioral response or anomaly is an attempt on his/her part to bridge the interspecies communication barrier ("I've been waiting patiently for you ALL day long! And since you couldn't even think about what it feels like to sit, alone, in the dark for hours with no bathroom access, see how YOU like finding a special treat in the middle of your bed when you collapse, exhausted, into it!"). Enzo as a narrator is so lucid, so believable in his thought processes and frustration at his intrinsic inability to effectively communicate to his humans, due to his damned "dogness," that while devouring this book in the span of one day, I felt alternating urges to pull my cats onto my lap as I read, followed by attempting to engage in a real, heart-to-heart conversation with them beyond the usual kitty-cooing babble nonsense.
Even more than provoking questions about the sentience of the domestic animals that we live with, Stein successfully offers poignant metaphors for the struggles and strains of life as well as inspiring meditations on how to approach them; e.g., in life, as in racing, "the car goes where the eyes go." Never stop racing, never give up - as Enzo would "say:" "Faster! Faster!"
Rating:  -
I'd heard great things about this book--from a family member who'd read it and from various written reviews. It pulled me in and I read it in one night (the font is very big on those 300+ slim pages), so it gets points for being engaging; I definitely wanted to know how things worked out for Denny. Yet I expected a lot more. More inventive writing. Characters who were more detailed. Less reliance on shocking plot twists. Enzo's perspective was interesting and shed an interesting light on the perspective of a dog, but the dog's narrative voice ultimately felt just like a 3rd person narration.
I think it would make a great movie, but I expected more from the writing.
(The dog on the cover looks like a Golden Retriever, not the Lab/terrier mix who is the narrator. An odd choice of an image for the jacket.)
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