Overall a moving read. I liked the characters - how can you not? - and loved Lily's voice, especially. One quibble: I admit that I was slightly irked by the way the author paraphrased passages from various other works as a means of description - Friday Night Lights, The Dogs of Babel (this one he doesn't cite by name but describes it on page 80. He at least could have mentioned it in the Acknowledgments). Both FNL and DoB were great, but Ted's use of them was jarring in that it took us out of his world a bit, I thought. 
 But generally, if owning a dog is a contract with heartbreak, then this book illustrates the wonder, beauty, and companionship that makes it worth the inevitable pain.