My thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

The danger with writing a memoir is that you have the opportunity to show the world what a huge, self-centered immature jerk you are. That's why I will NEVER write memoirs. I may come across as all of the above on occasion, but why confirm it?

This book falls into that trap. I'm not saying that the author IS all of the above, just that he comes across that way in this book.

He seemed to live by the motto, "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission,", because he was CONSTANTLY doing things behind his significant other's back that he KNEW he shouldn't be doing because they had discussed that thing not a few months prior!! That just shows a lack of respect for the other person and immaturity on his part that made me ragey. How can you claim to love someone if you don't respect them enough to tell them you want to adopt another pet?

So that got me rather annoyed and angry. Add to that the fact that this was basically the "soft sell" to get meat eaters to turn into vegans, and the book lost me.

If ALL animal lives matter, then I have to ask the vegans, before the fields were plowed, tilled, etc., were ALL of the small animals scared off of the land before the land was brutalized by machines? Dozens to hundreds of small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects all die when plant matter is harvested. So how do those hundreds of lives balance with the life of one cow/pig/chicken?

Don't even get me STARTED on the fact that agriculture is not sustainable, nor an eco-friendly way to grow calories for human consumption. Grass-fed, free-range food on the hoof and claw, when rotated properly, is actually better for the ecology of the area, the animals being raised and the humans who end up eating them. The animals raised in a non-factory farm environment have only one bad day, the last one.

I agree, factory farms are HORRIBLE and need to be stopped, but it's not bad to eat animals, that's kind of how we developed for hundreds of thousands of years. We just need to care for and raise the animals we use for food better than we are now.

Yes, I get the link, Esther is a pig and pigs are food and eating a pig is like eating Esther. It's a personal preference. I don't like bacon (shocker, I know) and I feel badly eating pigs, because they ARE very intelligent and are so closely biologically related to humans, that we can use their insulin for diabetes and their hearts for valve replacements and their bodies are used to test decomp in different environments to help CSI people train, so I don't like eating pig for those reasons, but I do eat other animals.

I have to wonder, would this even be an issue if they were raising a cow as a pet? Maybe, maybe not. Pigs are a sight more intelligent, so not sure if that would have been turned into a book and a FaceBook page if a cow was the star.

So this book was not for me. It hit a couple of my hot button issues, non-positive narrator and pushing veganism. I was a vegetarian for a good 10 years and a vegan for one of them. I was on that side of things for moral reasons and for health. Neither ended up standing up to scrutiny, at least when I got older.

Not saying to not be a vegan, that's a personal choice. If you want to do that, more power to you. Just be mindful of sustainability and other animal lives too.

Two stars, because I was expecting a cute book and got a vegan screed, and many non-funny stories of how Steve lied to Derek constantly and of Esther urinating everywhere indoors. Just my opinion, more people liked than disliked this book, so I probably read it wrong.

Heartwarming and fun. This book is the perfect read for all those animal lovers out there. A truly enjoyable read.