Much like EdnaO’Brien’s The Country Girls, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run theFrog Hospital?

This lyrical novel is set in a working-class neighborhood in Tenerife, far from the Canary Islands' poshresorts. Sirius observes a period of almost exactly 365¼ days between risings, keeping it largely consistent with the Julian but not the Gregorian calendar; nonetheless, its dates occur somewhat later in the year over a span of millennia. What I think readers will find most compelling about Dogs of Summer is the strong friendship between Shit and Isora. Readers will be unable to resist the spell of Dogs of Summer, a hilarious, devastating story that is brilliantly attuned to the erotics of friendship, the intoxicating muddle of identification and desire, and the power of both the sublime and the profane. The girls’ friendship is eventually threatened by a climactic incident of sexual violence, the repercussions of which threaten to forever split them apart.

Those ones, the new houses, were two stories tall and had a load of windows and banisters and a gate, most of all they had a gate, a real big one, a huge one, an enormous one that could let in a truck the size of a pine tree, all fuzzy with pine needles, filled with bananas and tomatoes and presents like Babybjörns and Barbies dressed up as nurses.

Unlike Ferrante, Abreu doesn’t shy away from the grittier aspects of girlhood—rather, she revels in all their glory. Instead, Shit experiences the world through the eyes of Isora, succumbing to liking things only if she gains Isora’s approval.As the summer goes on and the heat becomes ever more oppressive, friendship simmers into obsession, desire into intimate violence.

She and Isora “supsect” the wealthy “foreners” who inhabit the vacation homes around them, homes that are cleaned by the women in their family. I think it's something very typical of queer childhoods, the same girl who makes you envious for being more advanced or beautiful or intelligent you also like.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. We are encouraged to learn languages, to know how to serve, to give directions correctly, to talk about our land as if we were promoting it. The topmost houses grew up from the ground like desert truffles under pine needles when the rain got the earth damp. Dogs of Summer is lyrical and vivid, yet its poetic language is intertwined with a prescient sense of danger and brutality.

Dogs of Summer resists nostalgia and sentimentality while preserving the freshness and vibrancy of the narrator’s voice . I wanted to build a complex relationship between girls based on the need I had to build a self-centered discourse of childhood. For example, London, UK, is slightly farther north than Calgary, Canada, but has a milder climate from the presence of the sea and the warm Gulf Stream current. The cops used to come through the neighbourhood all the time back then, because according to them lots of drugs were sold there.In a section written in prose poetry and without punctuation, Shit thinks how she’d get “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 isora’s lips were flush like she’d been smacked on the kisser i’d kiss her on the red bits behind the cultural center. 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. Shit sweeps her intimate feeling under the rug, thinking of Isora as just her domineering and spirited best friend. The only thing that made me feel better was when I picked them out and rolled them between my fingers.