An artfully written fable has plenty of messaging but its storytelling lacks luster.
Some orphans and a father figure live on a distant island, shoveling the world’s trash to ravenous pigs that will eat anything.
This expressive but bizarre novel by Stoberock (City of Ghosts, 2003) is a deeply strange take on our quickly developing environmental challenges that falls somewhere between The Lord of the Flies, The Maze Runner, and every other fantasy novel that pits the children of our planet against a dying world. In this case, once more, the kids are isolated on a remote island populated by adults who are pretty much a-holes. The kids have to feed an unending supply of the world’s garbage, delivered by ship, to voracious pigs that can literally eat anything, including things like glass and toasters. There are only four of them: Luisa, the clutz who's already lost one of her fingers to a hungry pig; Mimi, the oldest but maybe not wisest; Andrew, whose narcoleptic fits are a big problem; and Natasha, who is just a prelingual toddler when the book opens. Things kick off when the kids open a barrel of trash to find another kid, Eddie, inside, and they quickly banish him. Why don’t the kids just escape? The water is deadly in some mysterious way, although they do find a remote cave to hide in from time to time. As a metaphor for climate change and humanity’s deepening arc toward self-destruction, the novel works fine, but Stoberock’s lyrical prose and lifeless characters rob the story of any juice. It doesn’t help that the grown-ups are grotesque, not only barbecuing and devouring one of the invaluable pigs, but also threatening to kill and eat the kids, encouraged by the banished exile, Eddie. If there’s a saving grace, it’s the one noble grown-up, Otis, robbed of his wife and son by his unplanned exile to the island, whose willingness to sacrifice himself is a model of literary nobility.
An artfully written fable has plenty of messaging but its storytelling lacks luster.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59709-044-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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