Honestly, I had a difficult time getting past the first sentence much less the entire book!.

The story starts out with what is possibly the longest run on sentence in the history of run on sentences.

It goes downhill from there.

The sentence structure is convoluted, the plot difficult to discern at best…

Perhaps this book was simply not to my taste, but I confess I wound up not finishing.

Wow, this is a tour de force of stream-of-consciousness writing in multiple voices, all full of idiosyncrasies and ideas and personas. It's a bit of a wild ride, honestly, and while I didn't really enjoy reading it, it does offer a unique take on poverty and desperation and sexuality and life in small and sad places.

I'm going to start this off with a big, fat TRIGGER WARNING. That title is not a metaphor. A dog is actually set on fire in this book. It's not even a big part of the plot, just a passing scene that is then kind of forgotten, which is somehow even worse.

But even without that dog part, I was having trouble with this one.

I will begin by saying it gets three stars (or more like a 2.5) because the writing is lush and vivid. I get that it is well done. I get that some people will really enjoy it. But, for me personally, this was a very tough read.

The whole book is a bit like a fever dream that starts to feel a little repetitive after awhile. The mystery of the dead brother is revisited time and time again, with little insight gained. His sister wanders lost, but never seems to find herself. Trauma is revisited over and over.

These patterns were not helped by the fact that the author doesn't use quotation marks and changes perspective between the lead character and a woman named Aphra (more on her in a moment). Segues between the two are super vague and after awhile (for me) it all kind of runs together, (Lots of "I" and "she" references.) Even though I read it in a short time, I kept losing track of who was who and what they were doing, which made the reading feel like work.

Also, I get it. Aphra is fat. (And she acts inappropriately because of her past sexual abuse and the grief from losing her lover.) But the way she is described here just makes her seem like some sort of grotesque monster, with her "copious sweat," car full of trash, drug problem and armpit sniffing. She seemed more like a cartoon than a real person, one can (and should) have empathy for.

Ultimately, not a good match for me personally, but I thank the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Sometimes experimental writers try too hard. That’s the case with Teresa Svoboda’s Dog on Fire. I wanted to like it, I really did. To be honest, though, if I wasn’t reviewing it online, I would have put it down without finishing. Svoboda writes the story of a loner woman whose epileptic brother has just died under mysterious circumstances, and the intertwined life of her brother’s abused and overweight ex-pseudo-girlfriend. The literacy choice that was most confusing was Svoboda’s decision to eschew quotation marks. It’s a literary conceit I’ve never understood, and as usual, it muddies the waters between whose voice is being heard at any given time. Intentional or not, it does both character’s stories a disservice. Given the book’s frequent references to Shakespeare, there may be a Shakespearean plot underneath there somewhere (Hamlet maybe, given all the dysfunctional family dynamics and the grave-digging scene). The best parts of the novel are when the author stops trying to be tricky and just lets the characters tell their stories in their own voices. This would be a lovely and insightful book with some quotation marks and a firm editor. But as it stands, I’d give it a pass.

Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Terese Svoboda' 'Dog on Fire.'

It's hard to describe this one in simple terms. It's a tale of loss, love, death, grief, families - 'normal' and otherwise.

The mysterious death of a shovel-slinging brother/son/uncle/boyfriend is the glue that holds it all together. The aftermath of that death focuses on the family and the girlfriend and that complicated and for me ultimately hilarious relationship between them. That's one of of the most enjoyable things about this book - the amount of humor, mainly dark, that's threaded throughout. The development of the main characters and their interaction- the sister and the girlfriend, especially - is wonderful. The cemetery scene late in the book should be horrific but it's funny and human. As the book progresses we see the son, the father, and especially the mother also fleshed out.

Small town, mid-west life is also entwined throughout the novel - the outsider, the oddities, the acceptance.

It's also a mystery - how did the shovel-slinger die? - but that's almost incidental and the answer, when we find out, is dipped in that same humorous pathos we witness throughout the book.

Some people might find the switch between narrators/characters jarring since it's not flagged in any way and I certainly found myself realizing a paragraph or a page in that this is a new voice and had to go back and reread in that voice. I got into the groove as the book proceeded and (although maybe it was simply down to this being an unformatted digital ARC) I took it to be a feature that underlined the closeness of the experience of loss and love even though the characters experiencing those things couldn't be more different on the face of things.