This was a great read. A seemingly idyllic suburban community is fractured by a fight over a dog park and the ensuing poisoning of dogs. It's about so much more than that, though - primarily the hollowness of such towns and the dissatisfaction felt by people who appear to have everything going for them. There are echoes of John Cheever in that, along with the humor and sharp observation of Elinor Lipman, plus a dash of Stephen King (psychological unease King, not horror King). The novel is well-paced and peopled with interesting characters.

4 stars ( )

Eat Pray Love opened the door to the #whitewomenwoes genre that should be firmly shut unless you can turn it into as poetic and universal an experience as something Edith Wharton or Carson McCullers would write.

Ennui is not easy to empathize with when the sufferers can cure the disease instantly by getting beyond their self-absorbed, insular, fake fears upper middle class to lower rich class lives.

I, silly me, expected the book to involve dogs. Instead, the dogs are just a gimmick to further reflect the misery of people who have too much money, too many possessions, too many prestigious finance jobs, and too many years of being around only people just like each other. ( )

A well-written social satire that is strong on description, lovely prose and wonderful characters...and a little light on plot. It's taken me a long time to write this review - so much, that I had to reread the book again. (Fine, I had to finish the book. It took longer than anticipated to finish it.)

There WERE lovely characters - but there were also a lot of them, and because of it, I didn't get to know them as well as I'd like, and I wanted more of them. There were an extraordinary amount of therapists and psychologists (and the expected college professors) for the college town, but they didn't seem...invested enough. Or perhaps that is all part of the tale, but I needed more.

The writing was wonderful, and that is why i finished it. But it took a while to get there.... ( )

The Short of It:

Perfect suburban neighborhoods are anything but perfect.

The Rest of It:

Littlefield, Massachusetts, is this perfect little town filled with psychologists and professors, wide open spaces and dogs, lots of dogs. But as perfect as it sounds, the dogs are off-leash and the neighborhood is divided over whether to allow them to continue to go off-leash or to impose leash laws. In the middle of this debate, someone is poisoning dogs one by one which has set the entire neighborhood on edge.

On the surface, there is a lot of dog talk but really, as with any suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else or at least seems to think they know everything about everyone else, there is a lot of conflict between husbands and wives, friends, etc. The white picket fences are just an illusion, really.

However, what could have been a really strong read was really just okay in my book. Halfway through, the story seemed to lose steam even though there was still plenty to know about what was going on in the neighborhood. But Berne’s depiction of suburbia was pretty spot-on and that is what carried me through.

In the end, I enjoyed getting to know a new author but wish that the pacing had held up a little better.

For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter. ( )

This unusual book looks at one of those "10 best small towns to live in" through the eyes of a social anthropologist, who comes to study the people who live there. What she finds is not what she expected. Dogs are being killed and there's a big brouhaha over a dog park. There’s definite animosity between the dog lovers and the not-so-fond-of-dogs people. Add to this a family that is falling apart, a daughter who doesn't seem to connect to her life, a wife who has an affair and a depressed husband who has lost his job in a brokerage, and this turns out to be not the normal, happy town one might expect. Yes, it is worth reading because of its originality of but it is not one of my favorites. ( )