Book with thylacine on the cover, so I had to read it, of course. Spoilers ahead.
Satchel O'Rye is a young man who is stuck in a backwater town and seemingly doesn't have much of a future ahead of him. His father is sickly and a religious nut, and his mother works too hard. One day, Satchel comes across a weird animal in the woods. Town pariah Chelsea Piper thinks that it might be a thylacine, though Satchel doesn't believe her. Now they must consider whether this really is a thylacine, and if it is, how it could change their futures for the better.
Eh, I wasn't too much into this one. It was overall honestly a pretty boring tale, and I at no point really connected to any of the characters. They weren't that badly written, but they also didn't have much going for them that really made them appeal to me. The only one I kinda liked at first was Chelsea because she's so passionate about thylacines, but when it turned out that she wants to capture the beast so she can gain popularity from it, my sympathies for the character instantly evaporated.
Satchel himself is fine, but again I never really connected with him. His struggles with his shitty father and always-busy mother wasn't particularly engaging to me, I was much more interested in whether or not Satchel was going to take that job he was offered or not. And of course in him possibly finding the thylacine.
The thylacine itself also sadly barely appears in the story, which is a shame. It's really more of an inciting incident and something Satchel comes across during the climax, than an actual character. So the lack of thylacine in this book overall had me pretty disappointed, especially with it being so front and center on the cover and in the title.
There's also one chapter where Chelsea dumps a lot of thylacine information on Satchel (and thus the reader), and not even all of it is correct. For example, the last known thylacine died in 1936, not 1937. And its name wasn't Benjamin, that's just a widespread misconception based on an interview of a guy who never even worked with the animal.
Honestly this book is just rather mundane, which made it feel boring. Not a lot happens in it aside from the character drama, and as I wasn't invested in the characters the drama did nothing for me.
If you like interpersonal character drama and don't
mind the thylacine barely being present maybe you can enjoy it, but I
personally found it rather boring. I didn't really click with any of the
characters and the interpersonal drama got old fast.
Rating: 2.5/5
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