River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The one good thing about this story is hippos. Introducing African wildlife to the U.S. is a thing, and Gailey gives us some good background on how this got considered. Hippos as potentially dangerous beasts that are a challenge to domesticate but repay the effort is pretty cool, and a great driver of the book. But that's about all there is to it. The characters are forced into two molds--roles in an Old West outlaw gang (explained, and deliberate) and also into modern sex and gender roles (not explained, though with more development it could have been illustrated).

The book has the feel of a YA novel but doesn't work as one--there's a lot of violence, including some very sad stuff. The plot is pulled off well enough around these forced characters, but it's necessarily uncomplicated in a short work. There's a couple of big gaps:

1) Gailey explains in the introduction that she has taken the real interest in hippo imports back about 60 years to set it in the old west. Trying to imagine some steampunk or Wild Wild West type technology to get the hippos to the Americas would have added a lot, but she chose not to.

2) The gender roles could have worked if Gailey had gone more in for this story as alternate history--where those gender roles are known and out but still marginalized. It sort of makes sense that these characters would be criminals in the Old West, because what else would they be in that society? Instead it just feels like modern liberal sensibilities are picked up and dropped into a Western setting. Not really helpful.

But 3 stars and yay for hippos.



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