Book Review: Balto and Togo: Hero Dogs of Alaska by Helen Moss

 

This one has been on my TBR for a while! Let's check it out! Spoilers ahead.

This book is an adaptation of the 1925 Serum Run to Nome, told through the POVs of both the dogs on the sled teams and their mushers.

Not gonna lie, I think this is just one of these books where I like the concept better than the execution. I've not read a lot about the Serum Run, but I have watched quite a few (loose) movie adaptations and some documentaries, and while they're not all my favorites, usually they do at least something for me. This book? It made me feel nothing. When obviously I should be feeling something in this book. There's dying children, for crying out loud. 

I really think that the biggest problem here in this book is that it has an ensemble cast we follow, rather than just a few characters. It's not just told through the POVs of Balto and Togo, but also through some other dogs, the mushers, and some people who stay behind in Nome. And it's just kinda overkill, not gonna lie. It really feels like we're following the serum here more so than the actual characters.

I get what they were going for here. They wanted to showcase the entire journey the serum took to Nome. But as a result we are having to divide our attention between a lot of characters. And the biggest issue here is simple: Because we're following so many different characters, we hardly get to know any of them. We never get to truly delve into one or a few individuals specifically. We get to know this huge cast only on a surface level and therefore don't really get emotionally invested into any of them. Which is a huge issue, since I'm obviously supposed to care about the characters of your book.

Even in the end, after the relatively happy ending, it's revealed that some kids and some dogs died during the events of the book. Okay, but legit, I couldn't be bothered to care. We didn't know any of these kids personally, and we barely knew these dogs aside from a name-drop here or there, so how is a reader supposed to get invested in and attached to these characters if we don't know them?

The rest of the book is okay, I guess. Aside from a fictional scene here or there, most of the characters and events do play out like how they did in the actual history. So it is pretty faithful, which I like. The journey itself is also pretty exciting.

But I think the character writing here is just a huge issue holding me back from fully enjoying the book. If this book had, for example, only focused on Balto and Togo. Maybe on Seppala and Kaasen as well. That'd be four central characters we'd really get to explore. But instead we have a huge cast we barely get to know and therefore we can't form an attachment to. I don't know, I'd really have handled this differently if I were the author.

Rating: 3/5