Full of talking animals, a small-scale realm unto itself, an epic of good-and-evil with Homeric battles, virtues and vices embodied in fur, noses, claws, wings, beaks…, great geo-political problems ensconced in a farmyard or forest. It is in the diction of the Old Testament. It is a Medieval morality play, characters sharply drawn, clean-cut bestial caricatures-but they are fully human. It might at first seem hopelessly dated rather, it is hopefully dated, it is searingly modern, it is genuinely classic and therefore timeless. Wangerin has taken stark good and evil and played them out in an almost predictable manner, unafraid of arrangements that could be called clichéd, trite, childish, overused. I have never read anything like this book before. This unique book, written in 1978, is grisly, gritty, earthy, painful, and beautiful.
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