This is a multi-layered book. At first glance, this is a fascinating story told from the point of view of a young boy about a family who opens a tourist attraction in Florida in the 1950s. There is interesting commentary on race relations and other political aspects of the deep South of that time. If you are a student of folklore, fable and myth, however, the book becomes more. Gods and holy figures of various traditions make cameo (and not so cameo) appearances throughout, some more obvious than others. It turns out in the end that Dogland is more than just a tourist trap, but a battlefield between good and evil. ( )

This novel hit just the right notes time and time again. Dogland, the attraction, is so quintessentially American that just about anyone who has ever taken a road trip in America will respond to it. (I have to admit that the time and place were particularly poignant for me, because of the many road trips my family took to Florida, starting just a few years after 1959, the year the novel is set.) Luke Nix's wild stories reminded me very much of my own father, who loved to tell tall tales to his children and still brags about having fooled us into believing he had fought in the French and Indian War. Grandma Bette's adamant rejection of any claims that the family is not of pure European extraction has been played out in many American families and the conflict around the hiring of Ethorne Hawkins, a black man, in the rural South is another classic American theme. This book is complex and goes far beyond its genre classification. It may not be the ever elusive Great American Novel, but it comes darn close. ( )

It's like Harper Lee and Isabel Allende got together to write something—one building the myth-touched world the other's adult-omniscient, nostalgia narrates. ( )

An engrossing novel with a wickedly delightful twist at the end. Nominally a book for youths, it deals with some subtle issues of good versus evil, portraying a spiritual battle that plays itself around us, whether or not we choose to be aware of it. ( )

this book was very different and had many stories to tell. ( )