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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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