River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey)

River of Teeth
The River of Teeth series, Book 1
Sarah Gailey
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In the mid-1800's, to combat a nationwide meat shortage, the American Congress passed the Hippo Act, importing hippopotamuses to the southern bayous. The lower Mississippi was dammed to create marshland for hippo ranches, which would provide meat and leather and jobs.
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
Winslow Remington Houndstooth, an English immigrant "hopper" (the hippo equivalent of a cowboy) whose ranch was destroyed years ago, takes a government contract to clean deadly feral hippos out  of the Harriet, the stretch of marshland between the dam and the gate preventing the hippos' escape into the Gulf of Mexico. To help him, he assembles a crew of rogues and miscreants, all the best in their fields and not a one worth trusting. While the government had intended to give him a year to round up the ferals, Winslow has a much faster plan, one with the side-bonus of exacting vengeance for his own destroyed dreams - but the caper goes wrong from the start, endangering his crew, himself, and everyone in or near the Harriet.

REVIEW: As alternate histories go, this is one of the weirder takes I've yet encountered. Apparently, the "Hippo Act" was a proposal that almost happened... clearly proposed by people unaware of hippos as anything but large sources of potential meat. Hippos are, in fact, about the deadliest land animal known, responsible for numerous deaths annually. In a South overrun with ferals, the swamps become deadlier than any mere alligators could make them, even as the domesticated strains of riding hippos prove every bit as clever and loyal as a horse. It makes for an interesting "Wild South" milieu.
What drug this one down in the ratings was the characters. While each had distinctive personalities, I didn't like any of them, and had trouble believing several of their interactions given what little I knew of them. One in particular seemed to have no reason at all to be part of the caper in any official capacity, and ends up contributing next to nothing, a subplot that would've meant a lot more had the tangled threads of character backstory not been so deliberately hidden from me. As a result, I couldn't care overmuch about the plot, which felt both stretched and rushed. I couldn't quite tell if this was a short story made too long or a full-length novel made too short, but something felt off-kilter by the end, leaving me unsatisfied with the conclusion.

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