I finished reading The Last Days of Dogtown last week sometime but was having trouble thinking about what I wanted to say about it. I was that impressed.
I might have liked it a little better if it hadn't seemed like a bunch of short stories strung together and passed off as a novel. In fact, if it was presented that way in the first place, I probably would have skipped it. I'm not a fan of short stories.
It was about ... um ... okay, it was about the death of a town. It used to be a nice place to live and then nearly everyone left. I found the back jacket description to be very appealing: "Set on the high ground at the heart of Cape Ann, the village of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and 'witches'". It takes place after the War of 1812 and spans, I don't know, twenty years.
The stories were sort of related but not enough to make me happy. Some of them were set years apart. It just didn't have a smooth transitional feel -- not for me, anyway.
Ruth Diamant wrote The Red Tent which I know many people loved. If I'd liked this one more, I would have gone on to read that one but I think I'll pass.
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Please go ahead & read The Red Tent. I hated this one by Diamant, and actually would have never believed the two were written by the same person had the name not been on the cover! She has a new one out about the holocaust, and I'm hoping it is more in line with 'Tent' than 'Dogs.'
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