Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: One Dog Happy
Author: Molly McNett
Narrator: Rebecca Van Volkinburg
Format: Unabridged
Length: 3 hrs and 55 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-18-12
Publisher: University Press Audiobooks
Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Molly McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment.
The adults in these stories can seem as hapless and helpless as the younger characters. Two neglected daughters use the language of clothes to cope with their parents' divorce and their father's mail-order bride. A young girl's bizarre sexual fantasies help her gain control over the chaos of her family life. A gang of teenagers accuse a farmer of bestiality. A divorced father tries to create a pony-filled world that might appeal to his daughters. In the title story, Mr. Bob, the minister's housesitter, loses a dog but finds someone to believe in. And in "Helping", the darkest story in this amazing collection, Ruthie's anger conquers her religious faith when she takes care of a severely disabled child.
We meet McNett's endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking: I am not allowed weakness; life treats people unequally; perhaps there is no God. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.
The book is published by University of Iowa Press.
John Simmons Short Fiction Award
These are stories for people who love stories.
Critic Reviews:
"One Dog Happy is charming and generous, smart and lovely, the gift of a subtle and compassionate writer to readers everywhere." (Charles D'Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum and Orphans)
"Molly McNett writes beautifully and movingly about characters at their most compromised. These clear-eyed and compassionate stories strike a wonderful balance between humor, insight, and toughness; each one is a surprise and a pleasure to read." (Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author, Madeleine Is Sleeping)
Members Reviews:
Skillful writing that balances the small and the large really well.
These are really good stories. I was amazed at how well the author captures the essences, voices, and thoughts of children, who are central to the work. Childhood itself seems to be a motif the author is turning and tossing around in ways that are really delightful at some points and really devastating at some points. At the heart of these stories seem to be ideas about childhood, luck, the life of things, and the death of things. Personally, I really like idea-driven fiction more than plot-driven fiction, and I find it's very rare for a writer to be able to do both of those things at the same time and do them well. But they're done with really good taste here, and there are moments in many of the stories where you get the sense that these characters are just big enough to be ideas but also just small enough that replacing them with other characters wouldn't make sense. That's a hard thing for a writer to pull off, but McNett does it superbly here.
One of the things I like most about these stories is that they work really heavily with mood. Some of the stories seem to be glowing with all our most pleasant experiences ("our" referring to the readers) from childhood but others have a peculiar pang I think many of us feel when we think about childhood memories that hurt us as adults, but hurt in the same way they did when we were kids.