Title: The Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Genre: Young Adult, Classics, Animals
Length: 134
Rating: 3 Star (3.5)
Description/Synopsis:
Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnap, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sledge dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, Buck must fight for his survival. Can he rise above his enemies and become the master of his realm once again?
Review – MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
This is all spoilers, but its a classic so this is the only warning you are going to get.
I know there are some that consider this a childrens book, but I could not bring myself to consider such a thing. Never, in such a short amount of pages, did so many characters which I had formed some attachment die. Just so much death. This would a wonderful TTT I did a few weeks ago.
Plot wise this book was a bit muddled. Most books have a clear start middle and end them with a smooth transition. I wouldn’t call the transitions between each part in this book smooth at all. It was BAM start BAM middle and bam ending. The ending was slightly better transitioned than the rest because we got parts of it throughout the middle but I would still only count the last 7 or so pages. The start only had about 5.
The plot was also a bit hindered because of the length of the book. With so few pages and really so much happening to Buck in the story, I found myself rushing to catch my brain up with what Buck is talking about because he made some transition that I hadn’t seem coming. It was a bit jumpy in structure.
There were quite a few characters in this book, both dogs and humans, and they each did their job. I had negative feelings towards the ones who were suppose to viewed in such a light, and I formed attachments to the ones who had nice personalities or Buck himself formed bonds with. I probably liked more than Buck did though, specially towards the end when he is happy to loose himself over to his wild side.
It didn’t really seem to matter much which I felt towards the characters because apparently just about all of them were doomed to die. At one point a whole group of animals (I liked these goes) and humans (who I didn’t like) died in a matter of seconds and then we take about two more seconds to process they were dead and then we were moving onto the next group of people who were probably going to die. While I get that Buck might not have been as attached to these characters as I had been and thusly wouldn’t spend much time thinking about their death, but the quickness that happened to these events was really disorientating to me and is probably the main reason why this book got such a low rating from me. I had the emotions and I wanted to feel them rightly but I was not given the time and its left me emotionally confused and made my chest tight with frustration.
All those things being said though I did still like the book and because it was such a short read I will probably end up reading it again to see if I handle it better next time. I recommend this book to anyone who is into classic books as I think this is pretty good one if it do not mind the structure issues. Don’t read to children though. Children don’t need to hear about so much dog death.
Till Next Time…
