A Fowl Kind of War.

The Dirty Bombers by Ed Taylor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a lover of Watership Down and a writer of animal protagnoist novels, I jumped at the chance to read this title. Gulls have always held character to me - garrulous, greedy and bold. I did enjoy this book. It moved along at a clipping pace, showed the situation from both viewpoints, allowing the reader to both sympathise with the gulls and the poor villagers being besieged by these fowl bombs.
Animal protagonist books can usually fall into two or three different categories - there are the allegory type ones, like Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Animal Farm; the semi-realistic ones like Watership Down, the Kine Saga and the fantasy ones like Tailchaser's Song and Redwall. This falls into the second camp and does so in a manner that is more-or-less convincing - the gulls behave much as gulls are expected, with the addition of structure and military organisation.

I enjoyed it, the plotting is tight and the characters - both human and avian - entertaining. Whilst the gulls plans for non violent protest may seem sound to them, there is an ever increasing sense of dread as you realise that their "peaceful" actions are condemning them to the probability of a cull. The ending seemed rather sudden, but I am not sure more was required.

My main issue is that I am not sure how well considered the audience is for the writing. It is listed as a "teen" book and considered an analogy of the Palestinians and Israelis conflict. However, given the "dirty bombs" delivered by the gulls, I feel it would probably garner more interest to the younger readers - it would have made a pretty neat plot idea for the 7-10 age range. However, the writing style is entirely unsuited for this age group, with a few (rather tame) curse words, rather mature concepts and relatively complicated prose. I do not think that there are many teens who would be interested in reading a book where the main characters were gulls. However, I could be wrong - and I certainly have devoured animal novels my entire life. So, in summary, it's a decent and enjoyable read, but I am not sure of the intended market.

Interestingly enough, soon after I started reading this, a news article popped up in my Google Newsfeed about the scourge of black-backed gulls in one of our major cities - they are carting rubbish from the local tip and depositing it and their droppings on high end businesses in the seaside district. A cull of their numbers may be approved.

eARC received courtesy of Troubador and NetGalley.

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