Can I still do book reviews on this thing?

*Testing*

Ahem. So, I just finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. It was a very up and down book - it started out AWESOME, and I was getting all ahead of myself, with "this is my favorite book" type thoughts. Then there was this long drawn out mid-section that just kept putting me to sleep (well, that or the baby... it's a toss up) and the ending was very good though!

Though, I have to say, a large part of my enjoyment of this book was the fact that it was drawn from the story of Hamlet, which I knew going into it. I haven't read Hamlet in a good 10 years (yikes, really? Senior year was 10 years ago?) so I could not have told you the story prior to reading this. But random themes and events did come back to me and with the help of wikipedia I recalled ;). You know, madness, ghosts, poison. And it was kind of a good distance to have from it. I'm not a Shakespeare enthusiast, but I do enjoy those plays more than most. I could easily see that Claude was Claudius, and Trudy was Gertrude. Wow, I'm like a brainiac. Sign me up for mensa.

So, the summary would be this: The Sawtelles have this dog breeding business where they aim to breed dogs that aren't purebred or anything, but good companion dogs. I think that's kind of neat... and that part of the story was really interesting. The dogs were so central to the story (in fact, I'm pretty sure Almondine was Ophelia?), and were almost given a voice. The Sawtelles had one son, Edgar, who was mute, though he could still hear. That was another interesting angle. Edgar's dad, Gar, dies inexplicably and Gar's ghost appears to Edgar saying it was Claude (Gar's brother) who did it. Is your HS Shakespeare reading coming back to you at all? Drama and tragedy ensue.

The writing was awesome, the characters were really interesting. I liked that in this book we get some explanation into Trudy's thought process. I remember in Hamlet being totally let down by how lame the female characters were... all 2 of them.

I recommend it... I kind of wished I'd been holed up somewhere during that middle portion with nothing else to do so I could have just motored through. So if you find yourself holed up somewhere for a few days (snowstorm? IDK) this would be a good time!