"Jepsen's emotional, challenging first novel focuses on family and addiction. ... Though the tone and themes are heavy, there's a sardonic humor and queer vitality to balance the bleakness. This is a difficult but urgent novel about the costs of dependency and the ways people obscure what they don't want to see."–Publishers Weekly
"Jepsen's first outing is filled with razor-sharp observations about this generation's ennui and the myriad ways people screw up their lives, and she vividly evokes the vast stretches of California that lie between the major metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco."–Booklist
"Don't miss [Tara Jepsen's] accomplished debut novel, Like a Dog, about a free-sprit Cali skateboarder, Paloma, who adores her hard-to-love addict brother, Peter, a 'beautiful dude' with 'long hair in a wild golden snarl around his head."–ELLE Magazine
"Jepsen proves herself a master of fusing humor and tragedy as she takes us on a psychological road trip through California's suburban wastelands, its cities of hope, and rural cash crop operations, mixing no less than legal skateboarding adventures, fierce, quirky desire, and tragic loss into a powerful and familiar coming of age story."–Beth Stephens, artist and filmmaker
"Tara's stories about sibling love, the struggle of drug addiction, and the bonding power of skateboard culture, will break reader's hearts wide open. So detailed and real, it's like being there. This book captures the gritty, feisty spirit of Sister Spit at its best."–Annie Sprinkle, author of Hardcore from the Heart
"Tara Jepsen's protagonist is a frenetic pinball in a machine of hilarity, recklessness, and existential ennui. Mining the MTV generation's legacy of self-doubt, substance abuse, and unappeasable search for meaning, Jepsen excavates a queer feminist parable of survival that is simultaneously bombastic and completely peaceful at its core."–Zackary Drucker, artist, producer for Transparent
"[Like a Dog] contains some brilliantly casual radical feminism along with its rising action and denouement, and it tells a familiar story in ways that feel fresh and new but not contrived ... wisdom so sharp, it stings."–BUST Magazine
"Jepsen is a master, racing through the story at top speed."–Lambda Literary Review
"Like a Dog asks us to see the world through our first line of defense–our own bodies–and reconcile how all our choices and decisions, physical and mental, eventually reveal their scars. With short, quick, frequently hilarious prose, Jepsen mimics the rhythms of taking in the world physically and weaves it all together into a much larger, and more complex, mental picture. . . . Like a Dog is a welcome addition to the world of fiction, one told with equal parts awe in the face of life's challenges and comfort in its embraces, a riotous yelp into the deep end after a frontside carve over the death box."–Adam Abada, Monster Children
