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A review by leftovergarlicbread
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
This book really ended up disappointing me. I probably would have given it 2.5-3 stars, but the book completely shat the bed in the last ~50 pages. It kind of felt like Buxton started off writing one story, and then finished it writing a different one. The first 2/3 of this book and the last 1/3 feel so different it kind of threw me off. The whole thing kind of just feels like an identity crisis.
I'm really sad too! I really really wanted to love this, the premise had me by the heart! Crows are my favorite animal, I also have lived in Seattle my whole life, and i really enjoy survival-type apocalypse stories, so a book set from the perspective of a little shithead crow surviving a zombie apocalypse in Seattle sounded like a premise tailor-made for me in a lab. And it just failed to deliver.
To start though, I did really really enjoy the characters. S.T. and Dennis were such fun MCs. S.T. had such a unique voice and was a very fun perspective. I found his development to be heartwarming and how his relationship with Dennis developed over time really got me. I am a SUCKER for found family. The descriptiveness of the book was really good too. Buxton has a serious knack for describing wildlife and plants and nature. I found the first half of the book to be really enjoyable!
That about ends with things I enjoyed. It felt like to start, she was writing a more introspective story, something slower-paced and not super high-action describing the downfall of humanity and the reclamation of nature. A story that's smaller in scope. About exploration, and rebuilding after devastation and crisis and continuing on and community and connection.
And then the last 1/3 of this book suddenly turned into a fighting zombies and staving off population devastating monsters and organized battles, and it really just felt like it came out of left field. It almost felt like she was writing. and then realized that her book wasn't super action heavy and wasn't really building up to an explosive battle-climax, and then panicked and just started adding stuff to give the book that ending.
It also felt like she didn't quite know what themes and messages she was trying to convey. The focus of them kept switching, and the other thing was that it was very obvious and most of these themes were just straight-up stated. My least favorite one was the very blatant "phone bad" messaging. "An addiction to electricity" is what caused the zombie apocalypse was frankly a little too on the nose for me. And that particular thing also really took me out of the story. I feel like just having them become zombies inexplicably would have been much better and more satisfying than "technology evil" ((Also doing some research I ended up finding out that the author is a VERY PROUD Cybertruck owner which. Certainly is something.))
She did also refer/compare the zombie virus to cancer which felt a bit odd and insensitive.
She also had a lot of talk about identity. S.T. kind of has this identity crisis going on throughout the book. He feels like he is a human. He was raised by Big Jim, his human, from a baby; so he feels much more connected to the human world than the animal or more specifically the bird world. And it does add some interesting internal and interpersonal conflict for him as he grapples with witnessing the death of the human world he holds so highly as he's forced to embrace the animal one. However I wish it had been handled a little bit differently.
As a trans person the way this dysphoria was described made me a little uncomfortable. The language S.T. used to talk about how he felt like he was supposed to be a person was-to me- very reminiscent of the way that a lot of trans people talk about their gender dysphoria. And noticing that parallel made me very nervous that the book was going to go on some weird "biology over what you ~feel~ thing but it didnt! It actually ended up concluding in a very nice way that i rally enjoyed! I just wish that the actual conflict of it had been written a little bit differently.
She also talked a lot about the importance of "murder"- family. The main character is a crow. And also of storytelling. She tied those in really well. About how crows are super social and their murders are the most important things to them, and how they remember people for generations because they tells stories and communicate. However, these were not really focused on throughout the story. The themes of found family and the importance of finding your "murder" were seen throughout, but it kept getting distracted from by other plot events.
I feel like she could have really focused in on these last two themes really well if she had decided to keep her book more slowly paced and not decided to suddenly get so grand in scheme so quickly from what felt like nowhere. If she had maintained that slower more introspective pace, this probably would have been a 3.5 to maybe even 4 star for me!
Getting into spoiler stuff now-
Dennis' death made me MAD! In general I feel like she didn't quite know how to effectively write death. For example Cinnamon's little arc made her feel honestly pretty pointless and just a cheap grab at the reader's emotions. She was introduced only to be killed off in a way that felt sort of pointless only a few chapters later. Having the hyena die LITERALLY as soon as it killed her is what made it not work. Her death was obviously supposed to be a sacrifice to save ST and Dennis from the hyena, but they ended up not even needing to escape. Her death felt like it didn't serve any purpose.
Dennis though. Oh boy. I cannot describe how upset I was reading that. I had accidentally spoiled myself looking at reviews, so I did know that Dennis died, but seeing the reviews like "i cant beleive they did my boy dennis dirty like that aaaa" were just people being upset that he had died but NO!! He got done SO DIRTY!!! It was so unserious and out of character too! The fact that she literally used the "dogs hate the mailman" joke as the basis for the heaviest emotional scene of the entire story absolutely RUINED IT!! If she had wanted to kill Dennis, she literally had the perfect opportunity to kill him with the literal almost-no-chance-at-survival play he had made literally like 20 pages earlier. She had him heroically defy death and save basically the entire animal kingdom in Seattle only to kill him off with a JOKE before the celebration of his survival even ended.
And also, having him run no thoughts head empty towards a pack of feral humans-which he has been actively running from and trying to survive against for the entire book out of the blue was so out of character. She just showed with Dennis finding the iPad and tricking the monsters into the water that he had SMARTS!!! He was clever!! He wasn't just a "dumb dog" and then she immediately made him one.
And it sucks too because the funeral scene actually made me cry!! If she had done his actual death well it would have made the scene!! "rows and rows of of cartoon cream sheep and just two black ones that I could count who were facing the wrong way. I thought they represented me and my Dennis."
(pg.265) This line DESTROYED ME!!!! I WAS IN TEARS!!!! This scene would have been perfect if Dennis hadn't suffered the dumbest most unnecessary death ever. Because despite that I still was genuinely really sad he died, and genuinely felt bad for ST and felt the pain of his grief!
Also the whole humans suddenly being able to start morphing into literal monsters that wasn't ever properly foreshadowed really took me out of the action. It felt like she had just suddenly come up with them just to give the animals some more extreme peril. I really did not like them. THey came out of nowhere and felt forced.
I also felt like ST's character development kind of did this, slowly building and learning and growing, and then he had his fight with Kraai, and then immediately after had Learned and Grown and Finished His Development. It was a little too sudden for me. I wish we had been able to actually properly sit with him in that misery at that crucial low point for much longer than we did.
Also, when ST and Dennis first got with the college crows, Kraai was going on and on about how their Big Threat was all the wild animals from the mountains and forests coming into the city and how they were incredibly dangerous to all the Domestics and other city animals. And then it was just... never brought up again. All their enemies were rapid mutation zombies or escaped zoo animals. It feels like she just forgot that particular plot thread.
Overall, the book just felt messy. It felt like she wanted to do a lot and had two very different ideas and instead of just committing to one, she tried to shoehorn them both in and it ended up fully ruining the book as a whole. This was another classic example of a great premise being ruined by bad writing and of a book completely ruining itself in the last 50 pages. Honestly, I'm just kind of mad that I bought and read this. It felt like a waste of my time and money.
I'm really sad too! I really really wanted to love this, the premise had me by the heart! Crows are my favorite animal, I also have lived in Seattle my whole life, and i really enjoy survival-type apocalypse stories, so a book set from the perspective of a little shithead crow surviving a zombie apocalypse in Seattle sounded like a premise tailor-made for me in a lab. And it just failed to deliver.
To start though, I did really really enjoy the characters. S.T. and Dennis were such fun MCs. S.T. had such a unique voice and was a very fun perspective. I found his development to be heartwarming and how his relationship with Dennis developed over time really got me. I am a SUCKER for found family. The descriptiveness of the book was really good too. Buxton has a serious knack for describing wildlife and plants and nature. I found the first half of the book to be really enjoyable!
That about ends with things I enjoyed. It felt like to start, she was writing a more introspective story, something slower-paced and not super high-action describing the downfall of humanity and the reclamation of nature. A story that's smaller in scope. About exploration, and rebuilding after devastation and crisis and continuing on and community and connection.
And then the last 1/3 of this book suddenly turned into a fighting zombies and staving off population devastating monsters and organized battles, and it really just felt like it came out of left field. It almost felt like she was writing. and then realized that her book wasn't super action heavy and wasn't really building up to an explosive battle-climax, and then panicked and just started adding stuff to give the book that ending.
It also felt like she didn't quite know what themes and messages she was trying to convey. The focus of them kept switching, and the other thing was that it was very obvious and most of these themes were just straight-up stated. My least favorite one was the very blatant "phone bad" messaging. "An addiction to electricity" is what caused the zombie apocalypse was frankly a little too on the nose for me. And that particular thing also really took me out of the story. I feel like just having them become zombies inexplicably would have been much better and more satisfying than "technology evil" ((Also doing some research I ended up finding out that the author is a VERY PROUD Cybertruck owner which. Certainly is something.))
She did also refer/compare the zombie virus to cancer which felt a bit odd and insensitive.
She also had a lot of talk about identity. S.T. kind of has this identity crisis going on throughout the book. He feels like he is a human. He was raised by Big Jim, his human, from a baby; so he feels much more connected to the human world than the animal or more specifically the bird world. And it does add some interesting internal and interpersonal conflict for him as he grapples with witnessing the death of the human world he holds so highly as he's forced to embrace the animal one. However I wish it had been handled a little bit differently.
As a trans person the way this dysphoria was described made me a little uncomfortable. The language S.T. used to talk about how he felt like he was supposed to be a person was-to me- very reminiscent of the way that a lot of trans people talk about their gender dysphoria. And noticing that parallel made me very nervous that the book was going to go on some weird "biology over what you ~feel~ thing but it didnt! It actually ended up concluding in a very nice way that i rally enjoyed! I just wish that the actual conflict of it had been written a little bit differently.
She also talked a lot about the importance of "murder"- family. The main character is a crow. And also of storytelling. She tied those in really well. About how crows are super social and their murders are the most important things to them, and how they remember people for generations because they tells stories and communicate. However, these were not really focused on throughout the story. The themes of found family and the importance of finding your "murder" were seen throughout, but it kept getting distracted from by other plot events.
I feel like she could have really focused in on these last two themes really well if she had decided to keep her book more slowly paced and not decided to suddenly get so grand in scheme so quickly from what felt like nowhere. If she had maintained that slower more introspective pace, this probably would have been a 3.5 to maybe even 4 star for me!
Getting into spoiler stuff now-
Dennis though. Oh boy. I cannot describe how upset I was reading that. I had accidentally spoiled myself looking at reviews, so I did know that Dennis died, but seeing the reviews like "i cant beleive they did my boy dennis dirty like that aaaa" were just people being upset that he had died but NO!! He got done SO DIRTY!!! It was so unserious and out of character too! The fact that she literally used the "dogs hate the mailman" joke as the basis for the heaviest emotional scene of the entire story absolutely RUINED IT!! If she had wanted to kill Dennis, she literally had the perfect opportunity to kill him with the literal almost-no-chance-at-survival play he had made literally like 20 pages earlier. She had him heroically defy death and save basically the entire animal kingdom in Seattle only to kill him off with a JOKE before the celebration of his survival even ended.
And also, having him run no thoughts head empty towards a pack of feral humans-which he has been actively running from and trying to survive against for the entire book out of the blue was so out of character. She just showed with Dennis finding the iPad and tricking the monsters into the water that he had SMARTS!!! He was clever!! He wasn't just a "dumb dog" and then she immediately made him one.
And it sucks too because the funeral scene actually made me cry!! If she had done his actual death well it would have made the scene!! "rows and rows of of cartoon cream sheep and just two black ones that I could count who were facing the wrong way. I thought they represented me and my Dennis."
(pg.265) This line DESTROYED ME!!!! I WAS IN TEARS!!!! This scene would have been perfect if Dennis hadn't suffered the dumbest most unnecessary death ever. Because despite that I still was genuinely really sad he died, and genuinely felt bad for ST and felt the pain of his grief!
Also the whole humans suddenly being able to start morphing into literal monsters that wasn't ever properly foreshadowed really took me out of the action. It felt like she had just suddenly come up with them just to give the animals some more extreme peril. I really did not like them. THey came out of nowhere and felt forced.
I also felt like ST's character development kind of did this, slowly building and learning and growing, and then he had his fight with Kraai, and then immediately after had Learned and Grown and Finished His Development. It was a little too sudden for me. I wish we had been able to actually properly sit with him in that misery at that crucial low point for much longer than we did.
Also, when ST and Dennis first got with the college crows, Kraai was going on and on about how their Big Threat was all the wild animals from the mountains and forests coming into the city and how they were incredibly dangerous to all the Domestics and other city animals. And then it was just... never brought up again. All their enemies were rapid mutation zombies or escaped zoo animals. It feels like she just forgot that particular plot thread.
Overall, the book just felt messy. It felt like she wanted to do a lot and had two very different ideas and instead of just committing to one, she tried to shoehorn them both in and it ended up fully ruining the book as a whole. This was another classic example of a great premise being ruined by bad writing and of a book completely ruining itself in the last 50 pages. Honestly, I'm just kind of mad that I bought and read this. It felt like a waste of my time and money.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Death, Gore, Violence, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Addiction and Suicide
The cause of the zombification of the humans is described as a pandemic/virus