o DAM

tysm to netgalley for this rockin arc about girlies growing up in a TOUGH place. though the characters were a little more removed than characters i would normally connect with, I thought they were just so cool to follow around.

I really loved the portrayal of queer adolescence, it was so raw and honest, and Abreu doesn’t shy away from making her characters a little rough around the edges! I do see the resemblance between Ferrante’s writing styles and Abreu’s, they have this ability to make the most mundane of things seem so captivating, but at times, I felt the book dragging a little. Moreover, whilst feeling uncomfortable is always a bad thing when reading a book, I feel like certain scenes in this book were purely there for school value with the graphic description. Overall, an arresting depiction of girlhood and quite a strange reading experience

With similar vibes to Elena Ferrante, this book is short vignette chapters of two girls growing up in Spain. Some chapters were more memorable than others.

Dogs of Summer is discomfort. It is an uncompromising, visceral, and raw portrait of girlhood and queer sexuality. It tells the story of Shit and her friend Isora during their summer break from school on the less touristy side of Tenerife, their home. Shit's sexual awakening and burgeoning love for Isora turns into obsession and it is not the only obsession prevalent throughout the book. The body and its excretions are a constant object of scrutiny and fascination.
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Dogs of Summer was out of my comfort zone, and despite that, I could simply not put it down. I don't think it is a book that one likes or dislikes.It feels more like a book that has you on a chokehold unable to move away. Shit as the narrator does hold on to you with her vivid storytelling peppered with expressions typical of the vernacular spoken in Tenerife that the translator Julia Sanches left for us to savor.
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While reading it I was reminded of the first time I picked Stupeur et Tremblements by Amélie Nothomb - read in French - or Doppelgänger by Daša Drndic, tr. S.D. Curtis, Celia Hawkesworth. At times Dogs and Others by Biljana Jovanović, tr. John K. Cox and Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker also came to my mind.
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"I’d have followed her to the toilet or to the mouth of a volcano. I’d have peered over the edge until I saw the dormant fire, until I felt the volcano’s dormant fire inside me. Sometimes Isora went real quiet when she got sad. She wouldn’t say a word for hours. She’d just sit in a corner of the room under the minimarket, right where the walls touched, and stare into the middle distance. Her eyes were like two splotches, like two bottle flies whirring in a room that stank of wine. Even though it bored me stiff, I always sat next to her and listened to her silence . Like when the men watch soccer and their wives watch it with them even though they could care less, because their husbands are feeling down on life and on work in the South and the women have no choice but to be there for them because it’s their duty."
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I voluntarily read and reviewed a free copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

First off, this book is gross. It starts with vomit, has a lot shit, more vomit, and some unexpectedly uncomfortable moments thrown in the mix too.

It’s summer 2005, and all these two girls growing up in a small village on northern Tenerife want is to go to the beach. But everyone’s too busy working cleaning up after the holidaymakers to take them, and they have to make their own fun.

Compared to My Brilliant Friend (I suppose I see it in the relationship between the girls), it’s quite a dark book, which reminded me of elements of Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais and the allure of a daring, slightly sinister friend that I first encountered in Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch.

There are some strong moments, but it felt more like an extended story than a novel; I think I would have liked to go a bit deeper and follow the girls for more than a summer. The ending also felt short story-like to me – was it ambiguous or just rushed?

Read if you enjoy a coming-of-age story with elements of more recent history, but if content warnings are relevant for you, check them out first.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC.

A truly fresh approach to child narrator literary fiction. It felt like in captured that period of young girlhood, where you are learning about your body and the world around but still naive to so much. I loved the friendship between the two girls and the mischief they got up to. I look forward to seeing what Andrea Abreu does next.

My feelings about this book are complicated: a small part of me thinks “ew,” but it’s full of endearment. There’s so much innocence to the narrative voice, that I can’t help but feel charmed. There’s a lot of descriptions of shit, and wedgie picking, and awkward sexual experiences, but they’re compared to quietness of Barbies, or the colorful markers, or whatever is inside that box of licorice.

The story covers little snippets from a summer in the early aughts, with focus on minute details from our 10 year old narrator’s complicated friendship with a girl from her neighborhood named Isora. For example, a chapter could be called “Jesus’s Little Head,” which is a small detail of an engraving on the headboard of her friend’s dead mother, and the story is about an early childhood lesbian experience.

This book won’t mesh with you, if you’re squeamish about basic bodily functions, because there are a lot, and they are… I guess graphic is the word I want here. I will not forget this book, for sure!

Thank you NetGalley and Astra House for allowing me to consume this amazing book… even though I kind of forgot I had it and let the license expire, but I bought the book before I realized the license expired. Oops! It was grand anyway!

A soft pastel cover, one which proposing an inviting premise. Then the title: Dogs of Summer. Provocative in its nature, the ideas of dogs and girlhood cannot be separated in Andrea Abreu's coming of age tale.

Despite its intriguing cover and title, the novel is anything but. A meandering speech gone on too long, it resembles a short film that has been adapted into a feature length movie. It's bearable for the first ten pages, but there is only so much one can take of reading about defecation and the blistering heat.

Thank you for providing me with an arc. I found the novel to be overall quite thoughtful and thought-provoking! I wasn’t sure this would be as good as it was and it exceeded my expectations. I am definitely looking forward to what this author is going to put our next! Thank you for providing me with an arc. I found the novel to be overall quite thoughtful and thought-provoking! I wasn’t sure this would be as good as it was and it exceeded my expectations. I am definitely looking forward to what this author is going to put our next!

I really wanted to like it it just wasn’t for me. The style of writing was very choppy and hard to follow.

I was really interested in this setting and story, but I had a difficult time getting into this one. I had to DNF but I think I will pick it up again at another time. This book was raved about by many people whose opinions I respect so I think I was not in the right headspace when I was trying to read it. Thank you Netgalley and Astra Publishing House for the ARC e-book in exchange for an honest review.

This transported me to an entirely different world. I felt so enraptured in the lives of the two girls in this book. It's short and I don't want to give anything away, but the book really examines the complexities of friendship, poverty, and what it means to belong to your culture.

What a brooding, brilliant, brutal debut!
This is the tale of 2 young girls growing up poor in the hot, cloudy, volcanic foothills of Tenerife. They have tough lives and feel so young, so vulnerable. This is a bold depiction of girlhood and intense, obsessive female friendship: there’s brutality and tenderness, love and hate, intimacy and loneliness. It’s quite magical but also disgusting.
I loved the imagery and language and the writing is poetic and so raw, it cuts you open.
Dogs of Summer is dark, gritty and unsettling- exactly what I like!
I can’t wait to read more by Andrea Abreu.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

A combination of Blue Is The Warmest Colour, My Brilliant Friend, and Paradais. There is a menacing undertone to this queer coming-of-age story that I think has the potential for broad appeal.

Beautifully written full of emotional awareness I was so drawn in so involved .A book I will be sharing recommending.#netgalley #astra

I don’t know whether to hate it or love it to be honest. I think my mindset shifts more into the like just because of how raw this book feels. The story is a tale of two young girls and their tumultuous relationship with each other, their family and their bodies.

It is often times very rawly honest, in their journey of sexuality but as I said it is very honest and realistic. It is a piece of literature than often feels surreal with its writing whilst grounding the reading in a very humble, ‘oh yeah that sounds like my childhood’, sort of environment. I related heavily to the atmosphere, where the setting grounds you in a story that feels like the journey of any next door neighbors growing up and discovering themselves.

The writing can often be jarring with its bluntness and lack of any precursors for sentences or sentence ends but it makes sense as we are watching life play out form the perspective of a young child, where the language is from the mouth of a young child so I wasn’t upset.

It is a warm blooded, sapphic coming of age that unravels itself like a poem at times. I enjoyed it for the most part but even if it is realistic, it was often very (very) odd reading such sexual content about such young girls. I question at times if it needed to be so visceral in its content pertaining to that. When checking it out on Amazon I saw it was at one point charting under Lesbian Erotica, which is very worrisome due to the age of the protagonists.

Thank you NetGalley and Astra house for the chance to read this one. It really was an overall joy.

Unfortunately, I had trouble finishing this book. I think I struggled to read it in the digital copy and may like it better if I tried it in a physical copy. I am not reviewing it for now, since I have not finished it, but I may update with a review if I finish it in a physical copy.

This lively novel is quite engaging and there's a reason it's compared to "My Brilliant Friend," I suspect this novel won't carry on with these characters as they grow older, but what do I know? It can be difficult to keep adults interested when the narrator is ten, but this novel moves along with humor and wit.

Thank you to Astra Publishing and NetGalley for the chance to read this title in advance. I picked this up expecting a sibling to My Brilliant Friend and I found something wholly different. It is a moving story about female friendship and love written in a raw, visceral and at times poetic way. A brutal read at times, it was also tender. It does a very good job of depicting the very complicated and sometimes grotesque world of young girls.

Dogs of Summer, translated from the original Spanish by Julia Sanches, Andrea Abreu writes a rapturous story about the obsessive friendship between Isora and Shit, a pet nickname given to the narrator at the tender stage of entering adolescence, in the process providing an authentically complex portrayal of the desire of girls. Left to their own devices, the two inseparable girls pass their days in the Canary Islands playing with Barbies, watching telenovelas, obsessing over pop lyrics, and exploring their growing sexuality.

Wow. Dogs of Summer was the perfect book to round out my July reading list! It was hot, sticky, gritty, gross, and authentic. While I did not have the same experiences as the characters in the novel, it reminded me of my own adolescent summer memories of having fun with friends, staying out until the sun went down, swimming in hot pools littered with bugs and leaves, and grass and sand sticking to wet legs and feet. Days seemed long, sweet, and full. The energy was welcoming and comforting. The themes in Dogs of Summer are darker, especially given that the girls are only ten years old. You can't help but feel nostalgic while reading this, while also cringing at the memories of being a young person growing up. The prose was incredible and captivating throughout, I can’t wait to see what else Andrea Abreu comes out with.

Many thanks to the Astra Publishing and Netgalley for an advanced reading in exchange for an honest review!