Shane Life

Lucky Dog
by Mark Barrowcliffe
RATING: 7 out of 10 

I finally finished a book.

It’s been a long time since I finished a fun book. I’ve been reading a lot of church books lately and needed a break. Lucky Dog by Mark Barrowcliffe is a book I’ve had on my shelf for several months and one I’ve been looking forward to reading.

The book focuses on a British real estate agent named Dave Barker who happens upon a dog that starts to talk to him. At first glance, a talking dog seems like a bizarre way of telling a story. To be honest, there were times where the plot certainly unravelled a bit, but the one thing that was always right was Reg the Dog.

Reg provides great nuggets of wisdom throughout the book with an intelligent and witty, albeit decidedly dog-like countenance. Consider his stance on neckties:

“Every time you put it on you end up going somewhere you don’t want to. That’s what I call a leash.”

Lucky Dog suffers at the hands of its main character, unfortunately, who makes one bad decision after another. It is those bad decisions that ultimately put the book in a bad place for me – a place where Reg the Dog was absent for large stretches of the book.

Still, Lucky Dog is intriguing to someone like me because Barker fills his off-hours by playing poker. When the dog enters his life, he suddenly has a leg up on the competition, an animal instinct (if you will) for his opponents weaknesses, confidences, and nervous tics. Reg the Dog gives Dave access to almost subconscious tells he can sniff out.

Along the way, Dave manages to get himself involved in a variety of quandaries, from shady business dealings and fraud to girlfriend troubles and problems with some mobsters.

Barrowcliffe’s characters aren’t terribly interesting, save Reg the Dog, who made me wonder just what my own dog might say to me if he could talk. It’s sometimes fun to imagine. But the humans (or the ‘hellooos’ as Reg calls them) are just kind of droll.

Still, the story is fun. Despite having a talking dog as the main character, it’s a very grown-up story about figuring out what kind of person you want to be.