Pigs

August 19, 2019
This lackluster allegorical novel from Stoberock (City of Ghosts) is about greed, waste, and the collective choices humans make. On an unnamed island, six pigs are confined to a sty, where they must eat the garbage that washes ashore. The garbage is brought to the pigs by four children who remember nothing of their pasts and know nothing about how they came to the island: Mimi, the oldest; Luisa, whom readers follow for most of the novel; Andrew, the only boy; and Natasha, still a toddler. The island is ruled over by an amorphously defined group of grown-ups, characterized only by their gluttony and cruelty. The children’s lives, otherwise stagnant and lived in fear of the adults, are changed by two people who appear on the shore among the garbage. First, there’s Eddie, a child who bears a familial resemblance to Luisa and whose memory of a life before the island gets him claimed by the grown-ups as one of their own. And then there’s Otis, an adult sailor stranded on the island after a shipwreck. His innate desire for goodness and ability to regret his past mistakes make him diametrically opposed to the rest of the grown-ups. Stoberock certainly has a point to make, but the flat, one-dimensional characters are unable to carry the execution through.

August 1, 2019
Some orphans and a father figure live on a distant island, shoveling the world's trash to ravenous pigs that will eat anything. This expressive but bizarre novel by Stoberock (City of Ghosts, 2003) is a deeply strange take on our quickly developing environmental challenges that falls somewhere between The Lord of the Flies, The Maze Runner, and every other fantasy novel that pits the children of our planet against a dying world. In this case, once more, the kids are isolated on a remote island populated by adults who are pretty much a-holes. The kids have to feed an unending supply of the world's garbage, delivered by ship, to voracious pigs that can literally eat anything, including things like glass and toasters. There are only four of them: Luisa, the clutz who's already lost one of her fingers to a hungry pig; Mimi, the oldest but maybe not wisest; Andrew, whose narcoleptic fits are a big problem; and Natasha, who is just a prelingual toddler when the book opens. Things kick off when the kids open a barrel of trash to find another kid, Eddie, inside, and they quickly banish him. Why don't the kids just escape? The water is deadly in some mysterious way, although they do find a remote cave to hide in from time to time. As a metaphor for climate change and humanity's deepening arc toward self-destruction, the novel works fine, but Stoberock's lyrical prose and lifeless characters rob the story of any juice. It doesn't help that the grown-ups are grotesque, not only barbecuing and devouring one of the invaluable pigs, but also threatening to kill and eat the kids, encouraged by the banished exile, Eddie. If there's a saving grace, it's the one noble grown-up, Otis, robbed of his wife and son by his unplanned exile to the island, whose willingness to sacrifice himself is a model of literary nobility. An artfully written fable has plenty of messaging but its storytelling lacks luster.

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Starred review from September 15, 2019
In Stoberock's extraordinarily imaginative novel, four children live on a desert island where all the world's waste washes ashore. They are tasked with the arduous, abject, and unrelenting work of feeding all of it to six insatiably hungry giant pigs. Moreover, a group of nameless and sadistic adults rule the island, and the children must hide from these uncaring hedonists at all costs. When a scared boy washes up in a barrel, the children wonder. Should he be fed to the pigs, too? Stoberock explores the toll on the planet of everything we casually throw away and an economic system that suppresses the hopes, dreams, and desires of so many. This is an allegorical text that brings to mind Kafka's darker stories or Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), not only for some shocking violence and some beautiful prose, but, also like Kafka and McCarthy's fiction, because the intended allegory is opaque, so the novel can be read in several ways, as about the climate crisis, generational debt, immigration, and much more. But perhaps most remarkable is that as well as building a rich, fable-like world, Stoberock simultaneously weaves an engrossing and breathless narrative about the human capacity for both destruction and survival.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)