Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook which I picked up because I'd very much enjoyed the last book I listened to by this author, and while the reading voice of Alison McGhee was quite a pleasure to listen to in this volume, the story was rather less than satisfying.

We're pretty much expected to believe that a young girl's sister dies by drowning, through her idiotic practice of running in the forest by a dangerous section of the river, but of course her body is never recovered. I found it hard to believe that there was no effort made to have divers find the body.

Apparently someone else had died here too, but there was no fencing and no signage that I heard of. That part was realistic because humans are morons when it comes to safeguarding lives, and in particular the lives of children. There have to be multiple deaths before preventive action is taken. It's the rule. Also, it's the rule in this book because everyone seems to be dying: people and animals alike! It's the Appelt Book of the Dead!

Anyway, sister one goes running off (for a ridiculous 'mission' she has to complete, which is later revealed for the stupid thing that it is), and is magically reincarnated as a fox. Why? Who knows? Maybe the author does, but she doesn't care to tell us - not in the part of this I could stand to listen to anyway, since this was a DNF for me.

A better question though is 'who cares?' because we're given no reason to invest in these people. The characters were uninteresting and uninspiring, and they did not draw me in. Adults are essentially non-existent and vacuous when they are. Children don't have childish thoughts.

The story was way too long and boring because it moved so slowly, which is ironic given that much is made of the speed of the running sister and of the fox she returns as. Given that the foxes have very human thoughts, leaving a ribbon for the sister to find as some sort of a message made no sense. Why not simply scratch the message in the dirt with a claw? Plus foxes are like dogs: they don't see green. An author writing about foxes ought to know this.

I was truly disappointed in this one. It was such a sorry contrast to The True Blue Scouts of Sugarman Swamp, and I cannot commend it.

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt

Rating: WORTHY!

Read by Lyle Lovett of all people, and pretty decently too, this audiobook turned out to be a worthy listen despite some annoyances, which may well not be so annoying for the middle grade reader this is evidently aimed at.

The true blue scouts are raccoons Bingo and J'miah, who are newly recruited to report on events in the swamp to their overlord, the Sugar Man, who I suspected from the off was a bear of some sort, but in the end I had no idea what he was! Meanwhile in the human world there are machinations going on! A developer wants to take over the swamp and turn it into some sort of theme park, and he has the support of the admirably-named Yeager Stitch (spelling - this was an audiobook after all!) who wrestles alligators for a living. You know how this is going to end, so the fun is the journey there and the author keeps it fun for the most part, especially in detailing the antics of the raccoons, and a band of unruly hogs.

My problems with it were two-fold. The first of these was the sound effects which I assume were written into the text, such as the attack of a rattler being described as snip-snap, zip-zap, which was annoying (as well as inaccurate) the first time I heard it, let alone the tenth. Also the idea of drawing out the letter 's' in words spoken by snakes is so far overdone these days that it's just irritating and not even mildly imaginative. Let's cut that out shall we? I could have done without those sound effects, but maybe younger kids will like them. The other issue was more serious because it relates to the overall theme, which seemed to be environmental - in that more than one party was working to protect the swamp from being plowed under and cemented over.

That's all well and good. No problem there, but one of the parties expressing astonishment that someone was planning on destroying the swamp was also the same one which was running a café that served sugar pie, which was made by pillaging the sugar cane that grew near the café. No one said a word about replanting this cane, to keep it replenished, All I ever heard was the clear-cutting of it to get the sugar. That sends a poor message right there and a hypocritical one too. You can't protect the environment by raping it. That's like cola company saying they're replacing every drop of water they suck up from the environment to feed us diabetes-inducing drinks, and then carefully arranging their accounting so they're really doing no such thing, but it looks like they are from a certain perspective.

That aside this story was entertaining and amusing, so I'm going to let the environmental snafu slide in this case and rate this a worthy read.