"Even Rose, who would have been my bosom buddy, if I had a bosom, just didn't get it." Silver Iris Nickles wants a dog, and within the first chapter the message is loud and clear. By chapter two her and Rose are painting her sleeping grandfather's toenails and chatting it up.

For a 1995 book, this one feels very rough and is worded a touch harsh at the start. Words like papaw and chew and mamaw stand out, and for those who don't know their meaning off the bat, it becomes a bit of a trip. The first few chapters are silly, but rough to read out loud.

There is a distinct lack of touch with reality in this story. Dudley is a stalker and eccentric fellow. Which is really really hard to word nicely. He's a creep, he stalks her for a long time, he takes two of her most prized possessions, he peeks in her window, he's really messed up. Definitely did not age well, but it's written as he's just misunderstood(but lines like "I wanted a part of you" and sleeping with things that were her come off creepy).

Her papaw has fake teeth, and has a heart attack that turns him around, and he decides to get married, which also reads weird. Sort of a final marriage to die during or something(honestly that part had me displeased and disturbed greatly). The Chapter of the marriage is even titled Two Dried-up Old Lovebirds. Kind of all the nope material I needed from a book right there because of implications.

There's talk of Avon and Kmart in this book, and whew, that alone had me in a tizzy, those are some relics nowadays, slowly fading out.

Some things that happen and are said are dated farther back than the nineties, making for a little bit of that aged feeling(and you gotta explain them too), but the book isn't bad, it's okay, not great or a thrill, just an okay book. In another ten or twenty years it might suffer worse from aging, had I read this as a child in the nineties I bet I'd have hated it a lot. It's not a dog book that grips you like most are. In fact, it's a dog book likely destined to just be let go of, and nodded to, but not much more. ( )

This was really a fun story with a pleasant series of twists by the end. I have to admit that I was a little thrown by the setting in the beginning. I didn't realize when this story was taking place. I think it has something to do with the fact that Bark Shanty seems like a place out of time with the world around it. Strangely, rural life stories seem to fit better with a time gone by in my head. I think the saving grace was that I could identify with Silver and the Dud and even Rosy on some level. I really liked that there wasn't any fall out between Rosy and Silver. I kind of expected one to crop up since they were people of such different priorities. It was like a friendship against the odds. The Dud was kind of a foreseeable character and yet he was likable all the same. I actually grew to be very fond of Papaw, a character that I didn't much care for in the beginning. The characters all grew and it made the book that much stronger. I liked the book, and I would recommend it to children in the upper elementary grades. ( )