Joint Custody by Lauren and Jackie Logsted is a cleverly told tale of love lost and found. Gatz, a dog who admits that the reader may have difficulty believing him is the narrator. The dog’s owner known as The Man is an introverted writer who meets The Woman of his dreams as he brings Gatz home for the first time. The omniscient Gatz intervenes when the budding romantic relationship falls on hard times. The authors created a fun dog’s eye view of a romance.

The storyline in this book is interesting. The book is well-written. But it is not what I expected. I did enjoy getting the dog's perspective of happenings.

I'm mixed about this book. I am a huge pet lover, so getting a POV of this pup is fantastic. He had me laughing at times, I really wished there was more of the characters and not sure how I felt about the ending. Overall, cute and laughable book. Great for all dog lovers and wanting to find a HEA.

I requested this book simply because I loved the idea of a book from the dog’s point of view. At first, I thought I had made a mistake. Initially, I thought it was trying too hard to be cute . . . the book, not the dog. Gatz is cute and he knows it. He, however, does not like to be called cute. It is so overdone!

The two main human characters love each other, but are horribly mismatched. The relationship finally falls apart and Gatz is devastated. He has to get his people back together and will stop at nothing to accomplish that.

As I said earlier, I thought the first person dog was a bit much. However, the premise worked much better than I expected. To be honest, Gatz has more of what I would call a cat attitude than a dog. He knows he is the most important character in the book and thinks very highly of himself. To me, that is all cat.

Anyway, this book was fun and heartbreaking all at the same time. Yes, it is a romantic comedy, but it is really more about relationships than romance. It is not all light and fluffy. All of the main characters, including Gatz, demonstrate emotional growth and the willingness to admit they could be wrong about some things.

Did I love this book? No. I did enjoy it though and am glad I read it. There was a lot more depth than expected and as in all good romances, things work out in the end.

This book was sent to me by NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Spoiler Alert: The ending is mentioned in, somewhat, detail as it greatly affects the tone of the review.
Okay, peeps, this is going to be a rather rambly and mushy gushy because… I haven’t loved a story quite this much in some time. As soon as I read the blurb I knew I needed to read Joint Custody. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a bit over the top/ridiculous with my reads and a romance story narrated BY A PUPPY is basically everything I never knew I needed in life.

But I am going to start with a pretty familiar disclaimer from me, but for a very different reason. A lot of times I’ll say that I am struggling to write a review because I don’t want to give away too much of the plot and ruin the story for you all. This is mostly my norm when it comes to romantic suspense or a good ole PNR where there is a hefty secondary suspense line. Unfortunately for me, it’s for a pretty sad reason this time. Joint Custody is possibly one of the best books I’ve read this year… but this is not a romance, folks. The overwhelming sadness I had when I reached “The End” and the people I’ve been rooting for throughout the story DID NOT get together… well it was immense.

So I am walking a pretty precarious line here because the authors and the take on this book are FABULOUS. The craft, storytelling, and uniqueness of having the narrator be an unreliable puppy are out of this world.

We start out with our precocious little narrator, Gatz, eating 2 lbs of chocolate (in his defense, he thought it was 1 lb because… puppy logic) in an effort to get sick enough to need an ER trip and bring his estranged owners, The Man and The Woman back together. As we are sitting in the animal hospital alongside Gatz and his humans, we are taken back through the timeline of when The Man and The Woman met and fell in love and their three years together… along with their subsequent breakup and agreement to share joint custody of Gatz.

This is where his little trick should have worked and The Man and The Woman would reconcile, right? Yeah, this is where my HEA loving heart kind of plummeted to the ground. They, in fact, do not. Now, I want to be VERY clear that the ending is lovely and happy, but it isn’t the happily ever after that I signed up for when cracking open what I thought was a romance.

Joint Custody would make an AMAZING book club book and is the warm, wholesome palate cleanser we all need in this world, but please don’t expect the typical romance ending because, while there is a satisfying end and we definitely have closure from all parties with one going on to have an HEA and the promise of a second for the other, The Man and The Woman do not, in fact, get back together. And my biggest question of what happens to Gatz (I mean, he is only 3 years old, are they really going to share joint custody of him for a decade or more?) isn’t answered. But in the end Gatz is content and so are the leading characters.

And as long as you don’t expect the normal romance HEA, you will be far more content than me.

I thought this was going to be a cute book from the dog's POV. But I quickly found myself bored. The premise was a Parent Trap type plot with a dog twist. While it was a great idea, as a whole, it did not carry through for my liking.

So this was just kind of a bummer. Caveat: I was having a very bad day and I thought this would be a fun pick me up. I thought the dog pov would be cute but it was a major impediment to there being any romance at all. Gatz recounts the whole mess of a nonromance from his perspective. He’s trying to get his two human parents back together. They were together almost his whole life, from the day he was adopted to three years later when they split. After the breakup, Gatz is only privy to The Man’s life during the week and The Woman’s life on weekends. In the end, we learn that this means he’s missed huge developments that completely change the course of the narrative. Also, though he’s one super sophisticated dog who knows what Pemberley Hall is and recognizes Henry Golding (actor, Crazy Rich Asians), he isn’t great at reading human emotion. So ultimately this is a story about an adorable and furry, highly unreliable narrator. He’s like a sophisticated tween trying to get their parents back together. There are lots of cute moments but almost no love story. The entire story is about a dog trying to get his humans back together and then basically (spoiler alert) finally realizing it wasn’t meant to be. What little romance there is has to do with a secondary character we barely see on the page. How this was billed as a romantic comedy I have no idea.