Book Review: The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford

The story of three animals that trek hundreds of miles across Canada to look for their masters. It’s gotten movie adaptations, one of which I remember watching from time to time when I was young (the later Disney remake). But is the book itself any good? Let’s have a look.

The story is exactly as described above. A Siamese cat, an old bull terrier and a juvenile Labrador retriever make a humongous journey across the Canadian wilds just to get to their masters.

I’m going to be blatant here, I didn’t like this one. And, believe me, it’s rare for me not to like a xenofiction. I’m generally all about them. But this one just didn’t do it for me.

The biggest issue I encountered was the author’s writing voice. It just did not engage me in the slightest. It just sounded like a stale description of events rather than an actual incredible journey, as the title promises. The events and story themselves aren’t even bad and can be engaging, but it’s just the way the author describes them that made me want to put down the book time and again.

The animals, despite having names, are also barely referred to by name, only as “the bull terrier” or “the cat”, et cetera. This made our connection to the main characters feel very distant, as if we’re not seeing an actual character that has a name and presence, but just a random animal. You don’t connect well to the characters this way, it feels very distant. You can write an animal realistically and “close” to the character without it becoming anthropomorphized. Just look at White Fang for example.

Just not a fan of this one. I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of my copy, but this wasn’t what I was looking forward to when visiting of a childhood classic.

Rating: 2/5