I started on this after reading Gailey’s “Do Hippos Count as Dragons”, the premise was simply too good to pass by. Even if I wasn’t such a sucker for Western steampunk(ish) stories, the idea of feral hippos roaming the Mississippi would have been alluring in its originality.

Unluckily, Gailey’s writing is not up to her ingenious premise. The whole thing reads like a slapdash novelisation of an unmade film script, possibly one for a 1970’s style adventure caper – you know, the kind that used to star James Coburn and hasn’t been made well anymore since Peckinpah passed –, with the operative word being “slapdash”. The writing is peripatetic and superficial, with narrative threads or insights emerging far less often than the eponymous aquatic pachyderms. Add some jarring anachronisms in a world that, for all I can see, is meant to be exactly the US 1890s except for the hippos, and things fall apart quickly. Which is a pity. I mean … “hippo riders of the Wild West” does have a ring to it.