Rating: WORTHY!
This is a very short (less than 90 pages!), well-written and educational story about two young girls who embark upon a quest to save some local wildlife. I had some issues with the story, but overall, I consider it a worthy read for the age group, which is middle grade.
Out to photograph prairie dogs for a school research paper, Jeannie and Mary Joe discover that the place they are photographing is going to be leveled and the prairie dogs (which are of course not dogs, but a form of burrowing ground squirrel related to squirrels and ground hogs) are scheduled to be exterminated. They decide to do something about it. I liked that the author evidently knows what she's talking about when she describes the prairie dogs, so it's very educational in that regard, and also in how to make a an official and grown-up protest about a problem.
This story was realistic in many ways. I would have expected no less given that the author is a resident of Colorado and there was a scandalous business from which this novel is no doubt taken, regarding the wanton slaughtering of prairie dogs, and the building of malls and the shameless, but predictable behavior of degenerate local government officials.
The evidently Nazi-trained City officials of Castle Rock in Colorado aided and abetted the extermination of a large prairie dog colony with poison gas pellets, but it's not only prairie dogs which suffer from this chemical warfare. The annihilation was done in spite of offers to relocate the animals and the city officials lied about it, as though they could not wait to see the animals bleed out.
This story seems to be heavily-based on that real life massacre, but it has a happier ending - although it's not always roses, and so is more realistic than pure fiction in how it plays out. There is also a side story about confidence building in Jeannie's best friend Mary Jo. That came with some baggage as I shall discuss, but I liked that the story showed the girls, particularly Jeannie, the main protagonist, to be thoughtful, smart, capable, and willing to work and research. Jeannie was brave in facing the "bad guys" - the property developers. She was a commendable protagonist.
I think this will be enjoyable for age-appropriate readers, but I have to add as an adult that there were some problems with the story which some kids might pick up on. I know my kids would have. The first is the rather hypocritical stance of the girls, who are not vegetarians (as judged by their consuming sloppy joes!), yet here are fussing and cooing over these cute prairie dogs. it's not just cute mammals which are threatened by humans. I felt the girls were hypocritical in that they give not a thought to the daily and routine slaughter of the cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens and fish that they themselves eat! I'm not going to fuss over this because the story has other virtues, but this kind of thing is worth keeping in mind from a writer's point of view.
Another thing which bothered me was when Jeannie went to protest the poisoning along with some other people, her parents did not accompany her! I felt that was wrong, and implausible. Either that, or it portrayed her parents as callously hands-off. Maybe kids will not notice this, and I know on the one hand it showed that Jeannie was strong and willing to go it alone, which was commendable, but it made her parents look really bad and uncaring, to me. If they'd had some important function they had to attend and could not get away from, then it would have been more realistic than just simply abandoning their daughter to her fate!
One last thing is nothing to do with the author, and everything to do with Big Publishing's longstanding cluelessness when it comes to book covers and illustrations. It's long been my theory that very nearly all book cover designers have no clue what's in the book they are photographing or illustrating for, and this one was a prime example. In the story, it's made quite clear that Mary Jo is overweight, and she's outright described as "fat" at one point. This is commendable, not that she's overweight, but that we're not being fed a trope diet of runway models for characters in a story! So far so good.
There is the trope 'let's ditch the eyeglasses and give you a quick makeover, and you'll be beautiful and popular', which I didn't like at all. I think it's the wrong message to send to young people, and especially to send to young girls, who are already bombarded with those shameless messages from the cosmetic industry. The right message to send is that if you're eating healthily and exercising some, then you're just fine as you are. We should not be sending messages saying you need to be pretty to be worth anything. On this occasion, I was willing to overlook that because it was a minor portion of a story which had other important messages in abundance.
That said, neither the cover nor any of the books interior illustrations gave any indication whatsoever that Mary Jo was even mildly overweight, which was disgraceful. I don't hold this against the author. She had done her job in this story. It was the artists and illustrators who sold out to popular norms. This is why I will never let anyone other than myself publish anything I write!
But that's a personal peeve. Aside from the illustrations, and with a nod to the issues I raised, I think this novel is a worthy read for the readership it's aimed at, and I recommend it.
