I discovered that Bad Dog to Best Friend had a new rating on Goodreads and the rating, which did not include any comments, floored me. This girl had given the book two stars. While many readers don’t rate books, they simply read them, I’ve had some very positive feedback from a number of folks privately so I was not expecting two stars.

In looking at her overall rating which covered 381 books, her average rating was 2.9 stars which meant that she didn’t like much of what she read. Still, her rating had really cranked up my misery meter. I had to know where Bad Dog to Best Friend stood among her other books so I started looking at her ratings book-by-book.

When I saw the list of books that she’d ranked only three stars, I felt considerably better. Among her three star ratings were: Forrest Gump, The Color Purple, Marley and Me, The Joy Luck Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Brave New World, 1984, Da Vinci Code, Call of the Wild, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Help, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gone With the Wind, Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, The Odyssey, War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet, and Sybil, the incredible story of the woman with 16 personalities that became a hit movie starring Sally Field back in the day.

Dark Places and Misery were rare books that she ranked four stars. I found an odd sense of comfort in that. How To Kill a Rock Star rated five stars.

I was neck-to-neck with the Twilight books, all of which got two stars from her just like me. Angela’s Ashes, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also received a mere two stars.

Being ranked just one star less than Marley and Me took a lot of the sting out of her rating, and knowing that she considered my book as good as The Art of Racing in the Rain erased the sting completely. More than thirty thousand readers have rated that book and it averages out at 4.06 stars, but for this girl it got only two, just like Bad Dog to Best Friend.

If you’d like to read the book that ranked just one star less than Marley and Me, and even steven with The Art of Racing in the Rain, you can read Bad Dog to Best Friend on your Kindle for only $2.99. The paperback version is $9.95 and includes several black and white photos.