I gotta read more thylacine books. Spoilers ahead.
Leo is an old man living in Tasmania who is doing whatever he can to protect the local wildlife and the nature they live in. But then a greedy corporation starts to invade the forest and acting suspiciously. Leo, together with his three estranged grandkids, will have to find a way to stop them. Especially when they make a particularly shocking discovery in the forest.
Okay. So. If I had to rate this book purely on the story and characters alone, how engaging the plot is and how well-written the main characters are, this would be a four-star book. I do think that there are some elements in here that are genuinely great.
So why that three-star rating? It's simple. This book has a few major flaws outside of the plot and characters which are holding it back.
I'll get to the elephant (or thylacine) in the room first: This book, or at least the ebook version I read, is full of typos and formatting errors. And I don't just mean a handful, or even ten or twenty. I mean a shitton of incorrect grammar, punctuation, or bad formatting. It's present in every chapter as far as I saw, multiple times. And, remember, this is an actual published book the author is asking money for. Had this been a free-to-download PDF made available by the author on the internet I wouldn't be complaining as much. But this is a book the author published and it isn't available freely. So there is no excuse for there to be this many typos/errors in a "finished" product. This reads like an unedited first draft.
The pacing also could've been worked on. This is a long book, being over 550 pages long in the ebook edition I read. And I don't mind a long book if it can justify its length. But alas, this one does not. The story frequently feels like it is dragging scenes out or meandering with the plot needlessly. I don't need my books to be non-stop action, but after a while some of these scenes started to feel a bit repetitive and lengthy.
The book also has the annoying tendency for Leo (or the narrator) to mention the scientific name of any animal and other nature we come across. Which just gets old real quick. I get the feeling that, at times, the author wanted to be educational instead of telling a story. But since this is a prose book, fiction, meant to read like a flowing story, it feels like the plot comes to a screeching halt anytime we stop to explain something at length. And the repetitiveness of all the scientific names was just annoying, especially when these names aren't relevant for 90% of the animals we come across. Just mentioning a few (relevant) ones couldn't have hurt, but we don't need to know every single bird, mammal, plant, etc. that we come across by the scientific name.
This book also buys into some common debunked trivia about thylacines, such as the endling being called Benjamin (debunked), him dying of exposure after being locked out of his night enclosure (from what I've read also debunked), and thylacines having stripes on their entire tails (irl thylacines only had stripes on the tail base. What we're often seeing on photos being mistaken for tail stripes is actually the spine segments in the thin tail showing).
The moral the story is trying to teach, about doing the right thing and helping nature along and protecting it in whichever way you can, is a good one, but again the author discusses it at length so much that it starts to feel long and drawn-out, and like the author isn't taking his audience seriously by spelling everything out for them. I get that it's an important message, and I do agree with it, but hammering it in so much just makes it feel kinda annoying to be honest.
So yeah. Good ideas here, the execution not so much.
Rating: 3/5
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