Dogs and Goddesses

By Jennifer Crusie, Anne Stuart, and Lani Diane Rich.

This is a book I will admit to getting with...somewhat lowered intentions. I had the impression reading the book's website that the authors pretty much started it as a joke and a lark and then got a book deal, and I was expecting silly fluffitude. Which hey, ain't always bad, so I got it anyway even though I had a few doubts.

Much to my surprise, I found that it had more depth than that.

The backstory: yonks ago, a dog-loving Mesopotamian goddess named Kammani Gula and her seven handmaidens/priestesses/sorta-goddesses were entombed. A few generations ago, a professor from Ohio opened the tomb, accidentally knocked over a sarcophagus and opened up one handmaiden, Sharrat. Sharrat evidently was still alive/awake/comely enough to seduce the professor and convince him to move her and her six sisters and their temple to Summerville, Ohio. A few generations later, the original handmaidens are dead, but they've all got local descendants.

And then somehow, Kammani Gula gets called back to life...and decides to recruit her dog-loving new handmaidens via a flyer advertising dog training lessons. There's Bun and Gen, the teenage bimbos/fertility goddesses, Mina, the crazy handmaiden of death, Vera the vitamin-pushing handmaiden of life, and then there's The Three. Why these three are more powerful than the others, I'm not entirely sure, but Kammani definitely puts them as a priority to her when she plans on retaking over the world.

The Three are:

• Abby, who's recently moved to town after the death of her grandmother with her dog Bowser, and pretty quickly picks up Grandma's magic cooking skills (she's the goddess of hunger). She also picks up a prickly professor whose demand that she provide cookies for a work function takes an entirely different turn than either of them would have expected.
• Daisy, who has a crazy mom who's dumped her hyper dog Bailey on her and fled town. Daisy is not so much into hyper craziness, but finds out that her power is chaos, and just playing with a clicky pen can start the winds of destiny. She also likes Mina's sane cousin Noah, who's supposed to be working at the dog training lessons. (It doesn't stay at dog training.)
• Shar, who is a professor with a cute dachshund (Wolfie), a boring lover who won't shack up with her, and irritating students. She's the granddaughter of the original Sharrat and actually lives in the first few floors of the temple, which her grandparents took off and made into a house. This leads to Shar waking up one morning to find a god in her bedroom. That god is Sam, a god-king who got perpetually sacrificed and Kammani wants to rustle him up to do it again. Shar finds him incredibly hot, but she is way baffled as to what to make of him.

The Three drink Kammani's power-boosting temple tonic when she forces it upon them, and thus they now have powers, such as the ability to understand the speech of their dogs. The latter is nice, once they get the hang of it, and they become pretty quickly accustomed to being demi-goddesses. But who would want to be a handmaiden to this goddess? Well, Mina is desperate to be the #1 rather than the #7 girl, but Kammani is mostly Not A Good Girl (to use dog parlance). She's not entirely swift on how to conquer hearts and gather worshippers in this world, despite Mina's promptings, and is more inclined towards domination and plagues. The Three have to figure out how to stop a goddess (and her mad handmaiden) somehow...

I will need to comment about the dogs: they are done well, with great fun, and even with individual voices. This takes some doing when each female character has at least one dog (and some acquire more). Some are more intelligent than others (Bowser, Wolfie), some's speech fit their character (bouncy Bailey is of few words, but they are enthusiastic), some dogs get rapidly obsessed with Cheetos, and the puppy even has a slightly different typeface as he learns to speak a bit more.

Oh, and btw, Lani and Jenny, I cannot believe you put in the Glittery HooHa. Yes, they did it. For serious. It is in there, cited as "Sam will be faithful to you because you have one!" Hoo boy. The mind boggles.

I will admit that there are a few flaws in the ointment:

• I sort of wondered at the handling of Bun and Gen, who come off as teenage dimwits at first, and then Gen suddenly gets a lot more depth and development. I wondered why Bun didn't get the same treatment. And for that matter, where are they at the end?
• I can't say I felt massively attached to any of the guys in the book. They certainly do have quirks (Christopher in particular, I'm still wondering why he hears the voice of a dead mathematician in his head), but somehow with the juggling of all the couples, I don't know if I felt like anyone got as much development as they could have.
• And while I know Kammani and Sam both were using god-like omniscience to find out things like how to talk in modern language and suddenly kinda knowing what Dunkin Donuts was and stuff like that, I felt like Sam really morphed the most of all to the point where I didn't even feel like he had a distinct voice any more. His voice really changes. I'm not saying I don't like the bloke, but you learn more about him from his actions than his words after awhile.
• I dunno about having your first orgasm while painting. That's...odd. 

But in general, it was better than I expected, had some depth, and was fun to read. I'm all for that. So, I'll give it four stars.

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My favorite dog-training story: when my dog came to live with my new husband and me after a too-long stint on a farm and we took her for a walk every evening, we decided to teach her to stop when she reached a curb.

So picture this: tall, handsome man kneeling in gutter explaining to dog (ears cocked, head tilted in fascination) that THIS (he points) is a curb.

Even now, years after she died, this picture makes me smile.