Book Review: Cry of the Wild by Charles Foster

 

Found this one at a bookstore recently, though it looked interesting. Let's take a gander, shall we? Spoilers ahead.

This book follows eight different creatures (seven animals, one human) and tells a short story of survival about each of them. From a mayfly to a fox to a rabbit, they're all here, and none of their lives are easy.

Overall I think I appreciate what this book is trying to do more than the actual book itself. There definitely are good elements about it, however. The animals for the most part act like their real-life counterparts and aren't anthropomorphized. The stories are mostly short but sweet and some had me quite engaged. The message of the book is also very clear: our relationship as humans with animals and nature is complex and needs changing from how it currently is. Humans sometimes mistreat animals (and other humans) and do a lot of damage to nature. That's really the main theme of the book.

But with that said, I'd be lying if I said I was very into this book. There were definitely some stories in here which were interesting to me, but none of them truly had me hooked. If was engaged at times, but there was no time where I really was really 100% grabbed by one of them, even the one about the fox (which is one of my favorite animals). Honestly the book, despite its messaging and harrowing stories, just didn't get a lot of emotions out of me. 

It's trying to be emotional at times, such as in the story where an orca loses her family or a poacher does horrible things to a warren of rabbits. But it just didn't really...grab me emotionally like the author was clearly intending. I think this was because of the author's prose, it just didn't really appeal to me very much. I did read this book, but at no point was I truly as invested as I should've been. Which is sad because these are good stories and they have themes which resonate with me. But something about the way in which they were written just put me off from being truly engaged.

Also, the book, particularly in the rabbit story, can get disturbingly brutal at times. It's nothing I couldn't handle, but still it made me a bit uncomfortable. Which is obviously the point, don't get me wrong, but I just want to issue a trigger warning here for people interested in reading this book: It gets brutal and topics such as detailed animal abuse, gore and rape are touched on. If these topics really bother you, you might want to skip this book (or at least the rabbit story, where they're the most prominent).

So overall I like what this book is trying to do more than the book itself. Based on the reviews I see on sites like Goodreads it definitely resonated with some people and I'm glad for that. With me the themes of the stories resonated more than the stories themselves and I had trouble staying invested because of the author's writing voice.

Rating: 3/5