A well-drawn but ultimately tedious zoological allegory of American politics.
Pedigo gives former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump the Animal Farm treatment in this political allegory.
It’s been a few months since the animals of the City Zoo overthrew their human keepers and declared their independence. After a few unsuccessful attempts to reassert control, the city’s mayor has decided to let them have it, leaving the animals to govern the zoo at their own discretion. The animals quickly adopt the signifiers of nationhood—a flag, an Independence Day, a national anthem (“Animals of ev’ry kingdom, / Hearken to our tale of hope. / How we won the keys to freedom. / No more bars, or chains, or rope”). The business of governing, however, proves quite a bit harder. The thought leaders behind the initial revolution set up a power-sharing government with an Animal Zookeeper working alongside representatives of the zoo’s various habitats. Keeping order among the menagerie proves difficult, however. The monkey-run newspaper has its own agenda, and the predators—who agreed to go vegetarian during the revolution—start to break their truce. When the wise impartial leader Leo the lion dies, coalitions arise to fill the vacuum. There’s bound to be a showdown, but do either of the rival Animal Zookeepers—Gus the elephant or Balthazar the donkey—really represent the best interests of all species? The prose has the ironic distance of a folk tale: “The media latched on to Balthazar’s accusation that Gus was in league with the People somehow. After he was barred from Primate Plaza, the popular elephant began giving speeches to overflow crowds over in Picnic Park.” Pedigo displays impressive imagination when it comes to bringing this animal society to life, so much that his ham-fisted retelling of the Trump era—with Gus as Trump, Balthazar as Obama, and the “two-toed sloth Brandon” as Biden—feels like a waste of the world. It’s a sluggish, predetermined story, and its insights into the political process are neither novel nor profound. Readers would be better off just picking up Orwell again.
A well-drawn but ultimately tedious zoological allegory of American politics.Pub Date: July 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798350959369
Page Count: 240
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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