DOGFIGHT, A LOVE STORY by Matt Burgess

GRADE: C

Great premise and the book started off with promise. Alfredo Batista, from Queens, NYC, is  in a bit of a conundrum. Because although he is happy that his brother Jose is returning home from doing time upstate, he also has some major worries. One being that he has to figure out a way to get a pit bull for the homecoming dogfight, and the other is that he's heard rumors that Jose (who has converted to Islam while inside and changed his name to Tariq) might think that Alfredo is responsible for him getting locked up and is holding a grudge. 

You get the sense that the author is trying to write his heart out in this novel as if this is the last book he'll ever write. Sometimes this earnestness produces great passages, but sometimes the writing seems a little masturbatory and distracting. Good try, but ultimately the book dwindled and I stopped caring.