This book was fun, but only okay.

It needed more restraint. From the blurb and the introduction, it's billed as a historical fiction with one absurd premise about the hippos, and from there I assumed that Gailey would play it straight and let the premise carry the novella (it's not long, ~150 pages). However, what I ended up reading was equal parts pulp-western and queer fantasy with only a smidge of historical plausibility.

I can suspend disbelief for a wild west populated by feral hippos, or I can suspend disbelief for a wild west populated by out queer cowboys, but the two together pushed me right through fiction into outright fantasy.

The French and Spanish accents were also rough to read.