Author: Howard L. Anderson
2012, Twelve
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of | 10 |
|---|---|
| Language..... | 5 |
| Entertainment..... | 7 |
| Depth..... | 2 |
You may not know this about me, but I have an inexplicable predilection for books with talking animals. Even if they aren’t that great, I’m into them. So with that caveat, here’s my review of this western cast with anthropomorphized marsupials (mostly).
The book opens with the hero, Albert the platypus, having escaped a zoo (in Adelaide), and wandering the desert like a fish (or poisonous duck-beast) out of water.
Right away we have a problem. Unless handled very carefully, as with books like Stuart Little or Beatrix Potter’s stories, writing a book with animals acting and dressing like humans requires a choice being made about the nature of the world the book portrays.
Are they stand-ins for humans, as in Brian Jacques’s classic Redwall series? Or do they live alongside humans, as in Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox? When you have a platypus escaping from a zoo run by humans, but then entering a desert full of gunslinger animals drinking and gambling in saloons, the inconsistency of the fictional world weakens the story right at its core.
You sort of just have to shrug all that off, which is a shame, since Albert’s zoo origins give him a connection with a later character that could have mattered in a deeper fashion than Anderson is able to muster.
In any case, Albert happens upon a friendly wombat named Jack, and the two take to traveling together. Jack dresses Albert, and begins teaching him the ways of the world. This includes conning animals into buying fool’s gold, and other such banditries. Jack, it turns out, is a pyro. When they get in a bit of hot water with a rowdy saloon of animals, he burns it down. Albert, who sticks out like a sore thumb, gets the blame, and is soon rated Old Australia’s most wanted criminal.
From here follows a fairly humdrum wandering stranger story. Dingos stand in for the native savages, a very American raccoon and a duo of drunken bandicoots offer comedic effect, some crooked wallaby lawmen mount posses, etc. There’s also a lone Tasmanian devil with a Kurtz-like notoriety living deep in dingo territory (and who offers yet another chance at depth that Anderson passes over in favor of a dime store plot). If you’ve seen a western you know what happens, a whole lot of animals end up dead and/or maimed, not all of them baddies.
And that’s about it. It’s a good enough story if you like westerns, but look elsewhere if you’re in search of something deeper than that, let alone exceptional. Of course, looking for that in a book that describes itself in the jacket copy as “an old-fashioned-buddy-novel-shoot-’em-up and a work of deliciously imagined fantasy” is a bit of a fool’s errand anyway. But hey, fool’s gold can make pretty enough jewelry, it’s just the longevity and value that’s not there.
Similar Reads: Frisco Pigeon Mambo (Payne), The Resurrectionist (O’Connell)
[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]
One of the main problems with this one is that it’s being hyped as a sort of “fun romp” story. Which it very much is not. (Not that this is Anderson’s fault.) Still, he seems to have gotten himself stuck between the story’s bedtime-tale-for-kids roots and its content-for-adults results. Who is this book for? Surely not for parents to read to their kids (it’s all blood and guts and death, and not in a cutesy way). And surely not for adults who like their characters to have some depth to them. Anderson calls it “Lonesome Dove recast for a platypus,” but it’s more like a Louis L’Amour book written for an audience who doesn’t like Louis L’Amour.
Not that it doesn’t have its merits. There’s a reason Sean gives it a 7 in the Entertainment category. And that 2 for a depth is a tiny bit unfair.
But not much.
from the cover, I assumed it was illustrated and/or a picture book. looks like it;s definitely for children.
Yeah. Just another example of poor packaging.
I dunno, maybe the 2 is a bit unfair, but there were multiple moments where the book seemed to be going somewhere more complicated thematically, then stopped short or downshifted back into a safer gear. At no point in this book is anything particularly complex going on. What adult themes are really at work here, besides some blood and guts? None really, just shadows of them.
Also even the blood and guts is PG13 at its peak.