Dogs of Summer

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Nearly every house had at least one bit left without whitewash, the exposed cinder blocks stained with mildew and rising damp. In a narrative style that mirrors prose poetry, the narrator feels “the urge to squeeze her [Isora’s] hand and twist it until all her fingers popped out of their sockets until her hands were just gone sometimes i hated her and wanted to destroy her. Translator Julia Sanches has chosen to translate it as “dogs of summer,” a nod to the American expression, “dog days of summer,” those hot summer days often associated with drought, sudden thunderstorms, mad dogs, and bad luck. This lyrical novel is set in a working-class neighborhood in Tenerife, far from the Canary Islands’ poshresorts. When they aren’t jointly dreaming of walking three hours to the beach, they are logging into chat rooms and exchanging messages with random people.

It describes the state of things without beating around the bush giving way to the purest form of tenderness, innocence, and care .It is a very complex time in women's lives because we begin to be tamed by the world and the rules of the adult world. As someone who grew up in South Florida, one of the aspects of the novel that really stood out to me was the emphasis on the impact of living in proximity to tourism. The question of translation, what’s gained, what’s lost, what’s changed in the process, is particularly interesting as so much of this novel’s power and meaning stems from the nuances of how it’s written. I felt the hairs on her thighs again, pushing out like cannons, and again I filled every pore with sunscream and she laughed and her chin mole glowed and I rubbed her with more sunscream.

an intimate portrait of girlhood friendship that treads the often precarious waters of obsession, codependence, and sexual violence.My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color in this lyrical debut novel set in a working-class neighborhood of the Canary Islands—a story about two girls coming of age in the early aughts and a friendship that simmers into erotic desire over the course of one hot summer. The ones that belonged to the younger people who worked in the South in construction and cleaning hotels, the ones with the shiny bee-em-dub-yous in metallic blue, metallic red, and metallic yellow with carriages that hugged the ground, so low that when they drove up through the neighborhood they left half their car bits behind them, and played “Pobre diabla” at full blast and “Agüita” and “Mentirosa” and “Una ráfaga de amor” at full blast and “Felina” a gazillion times at full blast.

Isora’s mother is dead (suicide) and one afternoon, the girls try on her panties and grind together on her bed. Isora is her first love, even though Shit does not seem to recognize the experience for what it is at her young age. Make sure your dog has access to clean, fresh water at all times, ideally in a large bowl filled to the brim.Juanita hated studying, and his dad was always saying that if he didn’t study he’d send him to pick tomatoes in the fields, and sometimes I suspected that it was more than just a threat and that his dad really did want him to start picking tomatoes as a lilboy. They may begin or end with the cosmical rising or heliacal rising of either Sirius in Canis Major or Procyon (the "Little Dog Star") in Canis Minor and vary by latitude, not even being visible throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere. Abreu’s novel, in Julia Sanches’s sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons. The writing is a crave inducing mix of bachatalyrics, Canary dialect, and the language of girlhood -- gritty, wild, poetic -- an exquisite feat by debut author Andrea Abreu and renowned translator Julia Sanches. Dogs of Summer is about the growing awareness of one’s own body and the commingling of jealousy, longing, and desire that exist in early adolescent friendship and during the fever pitch of girlhood summers.

In film, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Hundstage ( German for "Dog Days"; 2001) evoke their oppressive seasonal settings. During one oppressively hot summer, the 10-year-old narrator and her best friend Isoraexperience changes in their bodies and their volatile emotions — from love to jealousy, admiration,obsession and submission. The story revolves around a boy named Shinku Izumi, who is summoned to an alternate world where the inhabitants have animal ears and tails. Ebenezer Scrooge is described as "carr[ying] his own low temperature always about with him" to the point where "he iced his office in the dog-days". If Ma and Dad and Nana and Nana’s brother Tío Ovidio and me, meaning everyone who lived in that house, turned on every TV at the same time, I’d feel like the house was exploding and I was flying up, up in the air.Shit does all tasks assigned by Isora, at one point stuffing down dry pieces of cake to appease Isora, who was attempting to diet. In the 1813 Clavis Calendria, the dog days are a time wherein "the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, Quinto raged with anger, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies". The swallows had been in a frenzy all afternoon, chittering away as Nana and Dad tossed in the debris from that year’s building projects, as well as all the plants they’d weeded out. Isora was somewhere else, I realized, somewhere I couldn’t even see the beginning of, and for a second I felt scared. In the 3rd century, Aratus' Phenomena describes the time as Sirius blighting the bark of trees with its heat during the time it rises and sets with the sun.