Dog Days by Joe McKinney
Dog Days is a YA novel set in the 1980’s so no technology like cell phones or laptops. The kids actually go outside and do stuff!
I had high hopes for this award-winning book but it just never panned out for me. The book opens after a hurricane devastates Mark Eckert’s Texas neighborhood revealing a wrecked shrimp boat with dead bodies inside!
Sadly, the plot takes a weird turn right there and we get into boys bullying & threatening other boys, and a gun ‘borrowed’ from Mark’s cop dad that is used in a gruesome animal killing.
It never tied together for me; it wasn’t scary enough to be scary, not coming-of-age enough to be that kind of book, and Mark & his friends were just annoying.
I had a 13 yr old boy take look at it and he thought it was “pretty good” if a little on the weird side with no computers! There is a reader for every book so obviously I just wasn’t a good match for this one. I was given a copy of this book to review, the opinion is my own.