you lucky dog by Julia London

39th book of 2021

Reading period: May 06th 2021 – May 09th 2021

Summary

An accidental dog swap unleashes an unexpected love match in this new romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Julia London.

Carly Kennedy’s life is in a spiral. She is drowning in work, her divorced parents are going through their midlife crises, and somehow Carly’s sister convinces her to foster Baxter–a basset hound rescue with a bad case of the blues. When Carly comes home late from work one day to discover that the dog walker has accidentally switched out Baxter for another perkier, friendlier basset hound, she has reached the end of her leash.

When Max Sheffington finds a depressed male basset hound in place of his cheerful Hazel, he is bewildered. But when cute, fiery Carly arrives on his doorstep, he is intrigued. He was expecting the dog walker, not a pretty woman with firm ideas about dog discipline. And Carly was not expecting a handsome, bespectacled man to be feeding her dog mac and cheese. Baxter is besotted with Hazel, and Carly realizes she may have found the key to her puppy’s happiness. For his sake, she starts to spend more time with Hazel and Max, until she begins to understand the appeal of falling for your polar opposite.

Rating

Review

I spent an agreeable time reading this book. However, I had few problems with some aspects of the story.

This story is about a romance between Carly and Max; however, I was often taken aback by how Carly’s family and life are present in this book. It was sometimes overwhelming. I felt like it was a book about her, and that’s all. You need to know that it’s a dual POV story, but I found it inequal between the two main characters. At some point, I was questioning who’s the romance was about as a side character take too much space for everyone sake.

Nevertheless, even if this put me a little off, I like three specific elements in this book.
The first is that the construction of the story at the end is well done and change from the usual misunderstanding, which creates an argument/breakup between the lovers, which I am not a big fan of.
The second is that you have a character with a disability, and I love to see this aspect in books. We need to have more of it in stories.
Last but not least, THE DOGS. Like books with animals are always great, but here the dogs are cute, funny, and I love them both. Maybe it’s also because I love long dogs with short paws :)!

Overall, it’s not a bad book; just some element didn’t work for me.

Liz.