First of all, a couple of things : if you’re not a fan of excessive cursing, this book is not for you. If you’re note a fan of excessive anthropomorphizing, this book is also not for you!
If you can get by those things, then this novel is over-the-top funny, and still tender at times.
This is a story about the end of the world, the human world at least, and our narrator is primarily a domesticated crow named Shit Turd (ST for short.) His owner Big Jim starts acting strangely, and ST tries to help him until the day that Jim’s eye just pops out. And he doesn’t seem to care. Then ST decides to venture out in the world to find out what is happening to the people- or MoFo’s as he has been taught to call them. What he finds is that all the MoFo’s are zombie-like creatures now, and he makes it his duty, along with his reliable hound dog friend Dennis, to rescue all the domestic animals trapped in houses.
So ST has a potty mouth, and he is really funny, but underneath the brash crow chatterings, this story is really about connections, and Buxton does a beautiful job of describing the way the natural world communicates. Once the noise of the MoFos is gone, you can finally hear the rustlings of the trees, the calls of the birds, and even the whispers of the worms beneath the earth.
There are also short chapters narrated by other living beings- a cat named Ghengis who truly believes he is king, a coddled poodle who speaks in the 3rd person, and even a polar bear, a camel, an elephant. I love how different each of their voices are.
Even though much of the narration is cussing, there are also moments of extreme beauty, and I nearly cried several times. Once was this amazing passage, where thousands of birds are gathered, anxious, wondering how to proceed, and a young grosbeak breaks the tension by singing:
“The song was his father’s father’s father’s song, unrepeatable by any other living being. It was a song about kindness, a unique and casual caroling. It was soothing and leisurely and all his to share with the hundreds of beings around him, Nearby, a female grosbeak cocked her head in rapt attention and I wondered if this was the beginning of a new chapter for them, whether on another page further along in the book, an egg would hatch with this very song in the lining of its shell.”
My favorite thing about this story is the way the world goes on after the people & their world recedes, and we watch the natural world take over. Buxton imagines an amazing communication system between all living beings, known as Aura in the air, Echo in the water, and Web in the earth. She makes a point to emphasize how the humans were perhaps too loud to ever hear what was going on all around them. I wonder if a MoFo could be still enough to listen for a tree’s whisper. We also learn quite a bit about crows through this story- did you know that crows gather together when one of their own dies- a kind of crow “funeral?”
This book is a delight to read- but I did feel it dragging a bit in the middle. I listened to it, but I know that if I had been reading, I would have skimmed quite a bit. ST has an identity crisis- trying to determine if he is a crow or a MoFo, and it goes on for a bit too long. It is also difficult to hang on during ST’s interminable lists- lists of types of birds, lists of types of foods, just too many lists!
In the end, though, the story leaves some hope, and I was impressed with this fresh take on the old standard zombie apocalypse. I give it almost 4 stars- maybe 3.75!
Read with the Bookmistress 