Max: Best Friend. Hero. Marine
By: Jennifer Li Shotz, Boaz Yakin, Sheldon Lettich / Narrated By: Roger Wayne
Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
Kids’ll love Max. Heck! YOU’LL love Max…
I can’t help it—give me a good kids book, and I’m several feet shorter, many, many, MANY years younger. Max is just such a book. It has all the requisite things that sometimes make kids’ books tedious: The younguns against the world, no adult can help. As a matter of fact, the kids save the grownups!
Annoying, right?
Uhm, gotta admit, not really with this audiobook. The story gets convoluted to the point where you think: Yeah, if I were just a kid, all that mental wrangling would indeed produce such a rationale in my mind. Totally makes sense. Here’s the story:
Young Justin has just lost his brother, killed in action in Afghanistan. At the funeral service, Max, brother Kyle’s military working dog, is brought by for form’s sake, but the dog has basically gone nuts after the death of his beloved handler (and I admit it: I wiped a tear from my eye during the whole funeral scene. I know, I know. I’m a sap for that kinda stuff). The dog, it turns out, is so out of control, he’s going to be destroyed.
Unless… well, we come to see that Max responds to Justin, and Justin’s family, grieving their loss, are determined to save the last thing their son, Kyle, ever loved. Even tho’ Max is a violent nut-bag extraordinaire.
But Justin also has friends, and one of them, a pretty new girl, happens to know and love dogs, and she helps Justin get Max back to his former well-trained self.
Enter the bad guy… da da DAH!!!! Max haaaaates Kyle’s best friend, Tyler, who is now back from Afghanistan. Tyler has lied about everything, why he’s back, how Kyle died, why he wants to work at a storage center. The dude is shameless and has everybody fooled. Except for Max. Except for Justin.
So there are chase scenes, scenes with parents falling for the wrong story, dog attacks, young love, you name it, and Max has got it. It’s not too much, I honestly assure you (tho’ after listening to other audiobooks on the training of MWD, I did find myself wondering how, exactly, Max was trained to do so MUCH). I admit also that, though I’m a x1.25 speed kinda gal, I did listen to this at x1.5—not because I wanted to get it over with (as my usual speed-up reason) but because the action just flowed more quickly, felt far more intense.
Roger Wayne does a great job with narration. I’d just finished Top Dog where Neil Shah piled it on THICK whenever there was a different ethnicity going on, so I expected Wayne to voice Justin’s friend, Chuy, with a mega-Latino accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. Not so. Chuy was understated and not offensive at all (so sue me: Shah’s accent for Rod in Top Dog had me rolling my eyes a few times). Plus, Wayne doesn’t make his female characters sound comical. I really appreciated his performance. Not to mention, he really started whizzing through the text in a big way when the action got going.
Your kids’ll definitely love this audiobook; you will as well.
And in the end? Will Max be saved?
No spoilers, but HUZZAH!!!
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