I'm on page 30 and it's already a struggle. The cover, title, and blurb had me thinking this was going to be an easy and fun summer read. Nope. I'll give it another 30 pages but life's too short to read bad books ( )

This book took a while to grow on me, but by the end of the book I was quite intrigued by and involved in the characters, especially Baba. Quite a bunch of eccentrics. The mysteries and relationships also took a while to percolate...I think the next book in this series will be better (assuming you already know the book one characters). ( )

The Dog Park Club, by Cynthia Robinson, is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, where opera singer and half-Gypsy Max Bravo lives and works; his best friend, ad exec Claudia Fantini, drives him crazy with her antics, especially after her husband Larry abruptly leaves the marriage and Claudia goes a bit overboard in response. Max spends half his time wiping Claudia off the floor and the other half walking her dog Asta at a local dog park in Berkeley, where he meets a cast of characters and their canine companions. There's Vietnam War vet Ed, and laid-back Gator, Spaniard Jordi and Amy Carter, who lives across the street from the dog park and is 8 months pregnant. When Amy goes missing, suspicion falls on her husband Steve, who appears to be quite a hot-head and who is not taking good care of Dixie, Amy's pug, and the group in the dog park decide to find the evidence to condemn Steve. But Steve isn't cooperating with their plans, and soon the group finds themselves in hotter water than they can handle.... This is the first in a new mystery series, and I picked it up largely because of the setting, my old haunts of San Francisco and Berkeley, but I kept reading because it's a good book. The story is engaging, and sometimes quite funny; there's a lot of quippery going on, which always makes for a fun read. But then once in a while you get a serious, and seriously lyrical, passage too. For example, at one point Max's ghostly grandmother (yes, there's a family ghost in the series, moreover a Gypsy ghost and one that is remarkably able to smoke real cigarettes and drink real liquor while reading her Tarot cards) is talking to him about a photo of his grandfather, violin and bow at his sides, threadbare and in badly fitting clothing but for all that a dignified man, and then: "He died in one of the camps. He was methodically destroyed - starved into bones, flamed into ash, scattered into dirt, given up into the wind." Just beautiful writing, that. I already have (and am reading) the second book in the series, and I hope that there are more to come; recommended. ( )

Great fun. Real campy. good summer read. ( )