About the book:
It was the spring of 1985. Dr. Buzz Legare went on a fishing trip in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor, taking the family dog with him. They found the dog later, floating alone in the small aluminum boat, but Buzz was never seen again.

Fast forward two decades: his daughter Hannah is thirty-five with a successful business and a dedicated husband, Jon, in San Francisco. She’s left Charleston far behind, but not the conviction that her father is alive somewhere⎯not dead, just missing. Her obsession begins to play out in self-sabotage, culminating one night when, having royally screwed things up with Jon, she finds herself drunkenly climbing up her own fire escape—with disastrous results.

Head bandaged and heart bruised, Hannah is ordered home by her strong-willed mother, Daisy, and reluctantly welcomed by Palmer, her much more responsible brother who stayed behind. There, she encounters rivals and ghosts from her past, including Warren, the childhood love she could never quite forget. Enlisting his help, Hannah sets out on a quest to find out what really happened to her father so long ago. Palmer and Daisy worry about the manic lengths she’ll go to dredge up the past. Some family secrets, they reason, are best left buried for good.

Graced by a heroine every bit as memorable as the characters Katie Crouch introduced us to in Girls in Trucks—antic, flawed, and shrewd—Men and Dogs is a hilarious and moving novel about family, loyalty, and faith.

My take:
Katie Crouch writes stories about women finding themselves. In Men and Dogs Hannah is a total mess. She is an unfaithful wife seeking the answers to unanswerable questions. After bumbling around in her past and digging up a lot of old demons, she finds out she isn't who she thinks she is and finds a new lease on life.

I found the book to be compelling from the start to the very end. Hannah is not a particularly likable character, but its hard not to root for her. I walk away from this book feeling as if I truly know the characters, that I know what drives them, and why they have the flaws that they do. Men and Dogs is well written, a much more mature novel than Katie Crouch's first novel Girls in Trucks. Her writing is much more cohesive and overall the book read more smoothly. Girls in Trucks was a scrapbook, this is a novel. An excellent summer read!