Hare racism. Yay?
Spoilers ahead.
In this book, we meet Packo, a hare with a special gift. He soon is joined by his mentor, an older hare named Marsha, and the duo go on a journey to the dangerous Land of Deep Shadows, where their race of brown hares is being subjected to slavery and abuse by the white rabbits that live there. Packo, Marsha and some friends they meet along the way decide that it's their job to free the brown hares from the white ones' control.
I guess maybe lagomorph xenofiction just isn't for me, because I equally didn't really enjoy this as much as I'd hope as with Watership Down. Heck, the stories even share a few similarities, (being about lagomorphs, one of the main characters has a special gift of foresight in some way or form, sexism towards female rabbits, and deciding they're going to infiltrate another group of lagomorphs which partakes in slavery, trying to free them).
I'll give Watership Down some credit, though, despite me not liking it much, at least there are some characters I found somewhat okay, most notably Bigwig. Here, I genuinely couldn't care less for any of the characters, main or otherwise. They felt boring and lacking in unique personalities, and aside from Lotto there wasn't that much great character development. I wasn't attached to any of them and in the occasions one of them died I felt absolutely nothing.
This book also has pretty funky levels of anthropomorphism. Throughout most of the book you'd think these hares on about the same level as "humanized" as Watership Down rabbits are, but then there are scenes where the hares are just literally grabbing and throwing things with their front paws as if they were fully anthro. Which just leads to whiplash on the reader's part, who until then pictured realistic hares. But nope, there's literal scenes of hares literally stoning other animals in this book.
Some things in this book also really have not aged well. I'm not going to talk about the racism/colorism and slavery here because this, as far as I can tell, was at least handled semi-decently with it being outright condemned as a bad thing and the white hares being the villains.
But this book, like Watership Down, very much favors the male characters over the females. Yay, sexism, the good 'ol xenofiction trope. Seriously there's barely any female characters in this, and the ones that there are have little to no agency. And you can't use the "oh they're animals"-excuse here, because A) real hares aren't just sexist like that and B) they are anthropomorphized, AKA acting like humans. So this was a conscious choice of the author.
Another thing that hasn't aged well: the constant fatphobia and fatshaming of Lotto. Lotto is initially an antagonist who later joins up with the main group and becomes one of the good guys. He's also really overweight. And the book feels the need to remind us far too often. It's not just comments addressing his weight and size, no, the characters around him, both good and bad, also constantly like to remind him that he's too fat. Yes, even our heroes. Seriously, how the fuck am I supposed to like Packo or Marsha or any character in this if they constantly put down a character because of their weight?
I'd get them initially not liking Lotto because, well, he's an antagonist, like I just mentioned. It makes sense for them to not like him. But, again, this has no ties to his weight. Weight is not a qualifier of morality. And heck, even after he turns to the good side he still just gets comments on his weight and size thrown at him a lot, including our heroes and yes, even the narrating voice of the author themself. Sorry, but as someone who is overweight and doesn't take kindly to fatshaming at all this is not a pleasant thing to read. I get that this is an older book, but that does not suddenly make things like fatshaming okay, especially when the book portrays it as a perfectly normal thing to do because even our main characters eagerly participate in it.
So yeah, overall a pretty mediocre read. I wouldn't outright call it bad, but it hasn't aged well and it doesn't have much going for it in character likability or uniqueness of the plot (which feels like a lesser version of Watership Down, just with hares and extra racism sprinkled in).
Rating: 2/5
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