A book whose jacket copy promises "hilarious photoshops so clever they will make you laugh out loud" has an obvious problem the moment it turns into an audiobook, and this one runs three hours and nine minutes without a single one of them. Dana Perino wrote it, Dana Perino reads it, and the publisher Twelve put the recording out in October 2016. What a listener gets is the text: the dog, the husband, the years in Washington, the claim that a Vizsla is a place where political opponents can meet. What a listener does not get is the half of the product the copy spends its final paragraph selling.
Half This Book Belongs to an Earlier Dog
What Perino is doing here turns out to be smaller and warmer than the political framing suggests. The jacket copy sells a thesis about rancor and partisanship; the people who bought the book describe something closer to a scrapbook, with adventures, a husband arrested for walking a dog off a leash in Central Park, and a second Vizsla named Henry who came before Jasper. The lone four-star grade is blunt about the proportions and reports that half the book belongs to that earlier dog, which the marketing paragraph never mentions once.
Nothing about that is a complaint. Grief for one animal written through the arrival of another is a durable shape, and it explains an entry filed in March 2025, more than eight years after publication, by a reader still thinking about a dog who "passed on at such a young dog age" and "was very special." Whatever the publisher thought it was selling, that is precisely what the book delivered to at least one person, long after the news cycle it was built to comment on had ended.
In Print the Photoshops Are the Whole Joke
Two people writing in praise the pictures outright. One reports the book is "full of love, and photos"; another calls them great and describes photoshopped scenes putting Jasper in the roles of a football star and a news host. In print those images are the joke, the payoff and the reason the thing costs what it costs. Across three hours of audio they become, at best, something a sentence has to describe, and more likely an absence nobody narrates around.
A Broadcaster's Voice Removes the Author-Narration Gamble
Three hours and nine minutes is a modest commitment for a memoir, and the voice reading it belongs to a professional broadcaster. The copy identifies Perino as a host on Fox's The Five with more than two million followers, which is a career built on saying things out loud to strangers. Author-narrated memoirs are a gamble when the author is a writer working alone; when the author has spent years reading to a camera, most of the gamble evaporates before the first chapter. The pacing evidence supports that: nobody in the response section complains about delivery, tone or speed, and the complaints people do file are about page counts and picture quality, which are print problems.
Four of the five reviewers reach for words like fun, funny and enjoyed, and one manages laughing and crying inside a single clause. That register is exactly what a three-hour listen is for. Nobody is going to be walked through a difficult argument in an afternoon; they are going to be kept company. The book's own premise, that a dog is neutral ground where people who disagree can stand together, is a claim that survives being spoken aloud far more comfortably than it survives close examination.
Five stars sit on four of the five entries, and the exception, at four, is the one that describes how the book is built: it counts the share given to Henry, notes the photo treatment, and calls the whole thing a short read. Anyone weighing whether three hours is enough book for the price should start there. The rest of the entries record how the book felt, which is worth having but leaves you no wiser about the contents.
Where the Arithmetic, the Genre, and the Title Disagree
One number on this listing cannot be right. The badge reads 4.7 and the counter directly beneath it says a single vote. One whole-star rating can only ever produce a whole number, so a 4.7 average drawn from it matches no rounding convention in use; it is arithmetic that does not close. Five written responses sit under that counter as well, which makes the mismatch visible from two directions at once before anybody's opinion has been read.
None of the genre filing fits either. The listing files this under biographies and memoirs, which is fair, and simultaneously under home and garden, which is not, and then tags it Art and Literature, which appears to be about the photoshops. A book about two dogs and a marriage has been sorted into whichever aisle suited the printed object, and the recording inherited that filing without inheriting the illustrations that earned it.
Both versions of the title disagree with each other, too. The title field here reads Let Me Tell You about Jasper with a lowercase about and three spaced dots; the publisher's own paragraph writes it with a capital A and three tight ones. In that same paragraph the dashes have collapsed into hyphens, giving "politics-and how dogs can transcend rancor and partisanship" and a dog introduced as "Jasper-A.K.A. America's Dog." Small faults, but they are the first prose an audio buyer meets.
Perino's Voice Makes the Case the Photos Can't
If you already know Perino's delivery from television, this is three hours of it aimed at a subject with no opponent in the room, and that is the entire proposition. Dog people will do fine here. So will listeners who want a memoir that stays out of the deep end, because the political material is framed from the start as common ground and never pushed past that framing. Listeners who buy memoirs for the sound of a familiar voice are the obvious market, and at three hours the risk of regretting the purchase is small. Anyone who has lost a dog recently should know in advance that Jasper does not outlive the book.
When the pictures are the reason you want the book, buy the printed edition; two reviewers here name the photographs among the things they got for their money. Skip the recording too if a memoir has to carry an argument for you, because this one is content to be affectionate for three hours and then stop. Perino's voice makes the case the photographs cannot. For a listener who came looking for company, it makes that case well enough.
Before You Press Play
- Voice: Dana Perino reads her own book, and the copy identifies her as a television host with two million followers, so this is a career of speaking aloud turned on three hours of dog stories.
- Big ideas: Life with two Vizslas, grief for the first, Washington and television, the idea that a dog is neutral ground.
- Atmosphere: Affectionate, anecdotal, entirely unbothered.
- Worth it?: Worth the three hours if you came for Perino's delivery, not if you came for the photographs the copy keeps promising.
How much of this audiobook depends on the illustrations?
More than the runtime admits. The final paragraph of the publisher's copy sells the photoshopped images as a selling point, and two reviewers single them out for praise. None of that reaches a listener. What remains is the anecdote underneath each picture, which is genuinely funny, but the visual punchline is gone.
Does Dana Perino narrate Let Me Tell You about Jasper herself?
Yes. The author credit and the narrator credit carry the same name, and the description presents her as a host on a daily television program with a very large following. That makes this a self-read memoir by someone whose day job is speaking, which is a better bet than most author-narrated books.
What explains a 4.7 average sitting above a single vote?
Nothing legitimate. A lone whole-star rating produces a whole number under every rounding convention in use, so 4.7 cannot come from one vote. Five written responses are visible below a counter that claims one, so the display is broken in two places at once. Read the five entries and ignore the badge.
Will this audiobook work for someone who does not follow politics?
It should be. The book frames the political material as the thing dogs make survivable, not as an argument to win, and the reviewers who mention Washington do so in passing. Most of the three hours goes to two Vizslas, a marriage and a series of small domestic disasters.
