*I was given an arc of The Dog Share in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Harper Collins Audio UK and Fiona Gibson*

Synopsis: 

The Dog Share follows Suzy Medley who is the co-owner of a struggling Scottish distillery on the island of Skagdensy. After her now ex-partner runs it to the ground she has taken it upon herself to sort out his mess. All of the distillery workers hate Suzy and during her stay on the island, she comes across a stray dog who she takes in and names Scout. 

Ricky is a music teacher who grew up on the island. Visiting his dad, who worked at the distillery, he and his son Arthur come across Scout on the beach one day. Arthur wants a dog but Ricky isn’t sure, they decide to form a dog share with Suzy as a trial to see if he is ready for his own dog. 

Review: 

Let’s start off on a positive note. I received the audiobook version of this and I’ve found that I’m coming to enjoy them more. The narrators did a great job with this and although the reading at times was slow it didn’t affect the reading experience too much as I could play it at a quicker speed. Both narrators were excellent representations of their characters. 

Now for the parts that I didn’t like. Unfortunately, there are a lot more negatives for me as this book just did not work. Don’t worry there are a few positives, but I’ll talk about those at the end. 

For a book called ‘the dog share’ there was not a lot of dog sharing. This concept isn’t even discussed until over halfway through the book and honestly, the dog just was not an important element. 

This brings me to my second point of the book taking way too long to get started. Again not much happens for the first half of the book and the main focus was on the distillery. The dog, Scout, is a part of the book by then but he does not feel important. 

I feel like the title was not right for this book and it may actually benefit from a change. The dog and the sharing of him is very much second thought, but he does bring our main characters together. Well kinda, they would have met anyway because both Suzy and Ricky are linked to the always present distillery so basically Scout did not matter. 

Which honestly is a huge shame because I had really high hopes of loving this book. 

Speaking of love, The Dog Share was supposed to be a romance. I would like to ask where that romance was. Imagine my major confusion when it turns out both main characters are already in a relationship with one of them continuing for over 60% of the book. 

When it did come to the main characters forming a relationship it came from nowhere and personally I thought it felt forced. For the longest time, I was left wondering whether this was actually a romance. I would say it isn’t. 

As for the positives, the island sounded like it would be a wonderful place to live and I would have loved to see more of the community side. Scout sounded absolutely adorable and I really liked Arthur (Ricky’s son) as I think he was the most developed character. 

The book was not bad but it has definitely been marketed wrong. The title led me to believe that this would be a fluff-filled romance that centred around a dog. Instead, it was just general adult fiction that centred around a whiskey distillery in Scotland and a dog just happened to be involved. The story could have been interesting but my expectations were definitely not met. I do believe that I would have enjoyed this a lot more if the cover and description didn’t make it seem like the book was solely about the dog. 

I’m not one to leave books unfinished, however, if this wasn’t the audiobook version I think I may have abandoned it somewhere before the halfway mark.

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