Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is the book I was supposed to get when I accidentally got the not-great book The Hollow Kingdom by Clare B. Dunkle, so I kept putting off reading it because I had already formed an impression of what it would be about. I have to apologize to Buxton for this because I was way wrong.

S.T. (Shit Turd) is a crow who was raised by a MoFo (human) named Big Jim.  When an illness strikes all of humankind, including his beloved Big Jim, S.T. and his bloodhound brother Dennis take to the streets of Seattle where they have to battle local murders of crows, escaped animals from the zoo, and the zombified remains of MoFos.  This book is irreverent, hilarious, and I wished I had read it in 2019 and not 2021 because the whole time I just kept thinking about how horribly realistic this illness was, rather than focusing on the lighthearted nature of a dystopian novel told from the point of view of animals.  

It's a funny book. I love the observational writing told from the point of view of a crow. Humans do weird things sometimes if you stop to think about them and I love that Buxton's writing focuses on that.  I thought the characters of S.T. and Dennis were well-fleshed out and I loved that the Pomeranian named Cinnamon was a hero, not a useless puffball.  I even thought that Big Jim and Tiffany S., who Big Jim met on Tinder, were interesting human characters, even though we never met them in person and only read about them in flashbacks.  I found Buxton's ability to create full-fledged characters in relatively few words with just a few well-chosen anecdotes and personal possessions to be incredibly admirable. It's an interesting writing exercise, really. Write one powerful anecdote and describe a handful of your possessions and see if that does a good job of illustrating who you are. Bonus points if you can do it from the POV of an animal.

I watched the boy and girl human from the window. They have an obsession with moving the cold, white frozen water from one place in my yard to another place. Today they were working on the place where the yard meets the street.  The boy was pounding the frozen water with sticks and the girl was using these sliding things with ropes around them to move the frozen water away from the street to the yard right outside my window. She would wave to me when she walked by the window and she said something to me, but I couldn't hear. I assume she said, "Good girl, Hannah," because that's what she always says to me. Sometimes she would sit down on the sliding thing and ride it down to meet the boy human, who mostly just kept pounding. 

Once, she tried to pick up the sliding thing to pour the white water into the yard, but the white water just spilled all over her. She laughed and went to get one of the sticks.  I growled because the stick came close to my window and I wanted it to know that it could not come near me.  She looked happy out there in her purple coat and purple hat with a pompom on the top. Her nose was red and drippy, though, and I thought she was silly for moving around the white water.  She could be inside with me, all warm and toasty.  More white water would come tomorrow anyway.

Eh. I'm no Buxton. 

I'm not entirely sure what the big theme was, to be fair. Is it a warning about climate change?  Our addiction to technology?  Biological warfare?  Because the illness that struck the humans was not explained particularly well (I mean, why would it?  Why would animals have this knowledge?), the message of the book was a bit muddled, which is a definite criticism. But, on the other hand, it's not really a book about what happened to the humans. It's a book that imagines one scenario of what would happen to wild and domesticated animals if humans were suddenly out of the picture. Again, I'm not sure what the theme of the book really is in that case ("teamwork makes the dream work"?), but I don't want to analyze the book too much. It's funny, it's creative, Buxton can work a sentence like a dream, and S.T. is a character for the ages.

Notable lines:
1. From the POV of a cat - "I made my decision to leave the home. It's true that I shall miss the toasty laps and the dehydrated fish blobs and ambushing their bulbous toes under the bed blanket and how they used to worship me. Most especially, I will miss the cheese. But not as much as they will miss me. I am incredible." (page 23)
Cats are incredible. 

2. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "I felt a powerful pang of relief that I wasn't female. It seemed that being female meant to be prey, even among your own species." (page 79)
This felt like Buxton was speaking from a deep well of experience. I want to hug her.  Also, truthbombs hurt sometimes.

3. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "One of those insidious inspirational posters that said LEADERSHIP was barely hanging on to its place on the wall. It had a bald eagle on it. Irksome. What do bald eagles know about leadership?" (page 146)
One of the best parts of this book was the rivalries between animals, including entire species. Also, those inspirational posters are absolutely ubiquitous and insipid.

4. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "And everyone on earth knows that if you have the respect of a cat, it means your soul is one worth being around." (page 268)
I want Zelda the Cat to respect me, but I do think she thinks of me as mostly a way to get warmth and food.  

Things I looked up:
Tippi Hedren (page 16, among others) - An old-school American actress who starred in Hitchcock's The Birds.  She was also an animal activist.

Maasai tribe (page 162) - An African tribe of Kenya and Tanzania known for body modification, especially pierced and stretched earlobes.

Kwakwaka'wakw (page 162, among others) - Traditional inhabitants of the coastal areas of northeastern Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia - in the 2016 census, fewer than 4000 people self-identified as having Kwakwaka-wakw ancestry

Brazilian Satare- Mawe (page 162) - Indigenous people of Brazil known for their initiation rites in which they repeatedly use bullet ant stings paralyze the hand and arm of young intiates. 

Monkey Buffet Festival (page 162) - Annual celebration in Thailand to mark centuries of respect for monkeys.

Volitant (page 201) - Flying or capable of flying (in this case referring to a parrot who was flying)

Voltaic (page 259) - Relating to electricity produced by chemical action in a battery (in this case referring to a parrot's memory)