About the Book:

“Paul Iverson’s life changes in an instant. He returns home one day to find that his wife, Lexy, has died under strange circumstances. The only witness was their dog, Lorelei, whose anguished barking brought help to the scene – but too late.” “In the days and weeks that follow, Paul begins to notice strange “clues” in their home: books rearranged on their shelves, a mysterious phone call, and other suggestions that nothing about Lexy’s last afternoon was quite what it seemed. Reeling from grief, Paul is determined to decipher this evidence and unlock the mystery of her death.” “But he can’t do it alone; he needs Lorelei’s help. A linguist by training, Paul embarks on an impossible endeavor: a series of experiments designed to teach Lorelei to communicate what she knows. Perhaps behind her wise and earnest eyes lies the key to what really happened to the woman he loved.” As Paul’s investigation leads him in unexpected and even perilous directions, he revisits the pivotal moments of his life with Lexy, the brilliant, enigmatic woman whose sparkling passion for life and dark, troubled past he embraced equally.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is a book that I wouldn’t feel very comfortable giving a great recommendation for.  There is only one word that I could use to describe this book — OBSESSION!

The main character in this book — Paul Iverson — is the poster child for an obsessive disorder.  If this man were a real person, I would strongly be suggesting serious psychological help.  He is obsessed with his wife’s death, he is obsessed with teaching a dog to speak like a human, he is obsessed with what he could have done to change anything, and he is obsessed with finding answers to the unanswerable.  The man is simply obsessed.  Even for a character that is going through the grieving process — the proportions of his demonstration of obsession go way beyond anything normal, or healthy.

His obsession with his wife’s death is so sever that he manages to convince himself that it was a suicide — and that he is going to prove it no matter what.  (Hence the reason he decides to teach a dog, the only witness to the death, to talk.)  Excluding the fact that if one was going to choose suicide — falling out of an apple tree would not be choice one — since there is no guarantee that the fall would be fatal.  This obsession is a very descriptive demonstration of how unhealthy this state can be, and the ends that it can lead an individual to.

His obsession with teaching a dog to talk goes to extremes that are beyond even the realm of reason.  This man goes so far as to seeking a means to surgically alter a dog, so that it has the ability to speak like a human would!  I am not even going to try to figure out how the author expected a dog to have the ability to talk — when the character failed to teach the dog even the most basic of human sounds.

Overall I found the book to be very poorly thought out, and even worse in its presentation.  I was horrified at the descriptions of the surgical alteration of the dogs — and I even began to wonder how does someone even conceive of something like this! Basically, I just would not recommend this book.  The plot is weak at best, and for dog lovers this book could easily be considered a crime.

Tags: Family, Grief, Loss, Suffering

Category: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense/Thriller