This isn’t usual for me, but I started reading this book the same day I bought it, at a library sale. Waiting for my kid and just fished a book out of the bag to idle away the time. Found it interesting enough I kept going, though by the end I decided not to look for the sequel. I liked some aspects of this story, others not so much. It’s about a family of somewhat anthropomorphic raccoons. They live in the forest, foraging for their food and have other habits just like real raccoons. But they talk to each other, have humanlike postures (in the pictures), make stretchers and beds, care for their injured and sick, use clamshells to hold water, teach themselves how to read, etc. Most of this I was able to accept and go along with as part of the story, but it got more and more unbelievable further into the book.
The main raccoon family gets displaced by a forest fire and has to find a new home. They have to avoid a rival group of raccoons who compete for territory and food resources. They end up rather close to some human habitations, which makes the older raccoons nervous and cautious, but the young ones are curious. A big part of the story is about how the young raccoons learn from the older ones to behave well, to be kind and obedient, and so on. Mainly because this raccoon family “follows the Maker” and the whole thing has a strong religious bent. There’s a mythology among the raccoons about how humans used to also adhere to the Maker’s teachings but fell away long ago and became enemies instead. These raccoons have specific teachings, a thing like raccoon version of a Rosetta stone that lets them translate human writing (very painstakingly), and eschew eating other animals as part of their moral code. The rival raccoons by the way, don’t follow any such teachings, eat anything they can find (like real raccoons) and are unpleasant, fierce and aggressive.
So one little raccoon goes over a wall on the edge of the forest and discovers a church with a graveyard (though they don’t know what any of that is). They puzzle over the writing on the gravestones, thinking it means something. They make contact with a little girl who gives them food, and then starts leaving them written messages, which they are able to decipher. One of the raccoons figures out how to write back to her, using mud instead of ink. It was quite clever. Where the story really lost me was how the raccoons were able to translate a Bible and read it, and from there extrapolate what some of the pictures they saw on papers left around the church meant, and make huge leaps of comprehension in regards to religious history. It just did not make any sense to me, even in the context of this fiction. How they could go from barely understanding a handwritten note that simply said “for you” to not only translating but reading and grasping entire pages of the Bible, was nonsensical to me. It was just too much. And to really hammer home the message, there’s a whole parallel series of events among the raccoons, where one of the rival group comes over to the “good” family’s side, a young one among them betrays their presence to a hunter, is forgiven by the elders, and an older raccoons puts himself in mortal danger to protect the group. Making the “ultimate sacrifice”. It was a touching story, it was just too overdone with the religious ideas and the crazy implications about what the raccoons could understand. I like my fiction to keep within some degree of reason. Or at least to follow its own logic
I did like that the raccoons called the humans “Uprights”. That was a unique take on it (usually books with talking animals refer to people as “two-legs” or something similar). The drawings by Kathryn Penk Koch are charming in their own way. (I was very surprised to see someone else’s review online remark that they learned so much about raccoons from this book. Uh, but raccoons don’t live and act this way!)
In a nutshell: raccoons in the forest find a new home, deal with rivals, learn to read the Bible and follow God.
Completed on 5/25/24.
2 Responses
I snorted out loud when I got to the Bible part. I was worried/guessing that it was building up to that!
Yup.