Fierce Kingdom - Gin Phillips

There is a lesson to be learned in this book: don't have children, or they're likely to get you killed in a mass shooting because they don't know when to shut up and behave themselves.

Yup, I said it.

With that out of the way, let's get into it.  Fierce Kingdom is the story of Joan, who takes her son Lincoln to the zoo one day and, as they're leaving, realizes that the zoo is now the site of a mass shooting.  With at least one shooter between her and the exit, she takes her four-year-old and flees back into the zoo, looking for a place to hide.  But of course, running and hiding with a four-year-old isn't exactly the easiest task in the world, and Joan is (understandably) not willing to let her son go, and so the chase is on.

What's cool about this is that it's essentially the 24 of books.  If you're a moderately fast reader, you can probably finish this book in between three and four hours, which is about the timespan in which the entire story takes place.  You could definitely do it if you cut out the chapters about the other characters in the zoo, but I guess those were at least somewhat necessary.  But with that said, the pacing here is somewhat off.  There's a wonderful build of suspense in the beginning, because everything seems so happy and idyllic and yet we, as readers, know that something is about to go horribly wrong.  But beyond that, other than a few bursts of Joan hauling Lincoln from one hiding spot to another--just two of them, really--there's a lot of sitting and hoping that they won't be found, and that does not exactly make for riveting reading.  Phillips jazzes up those periods by throwing in a couple of instances of near-discovery, but it's not enough to fix the lagging pace, or to prevent me from wanting to whallop Joan alongside the head.

Yes, let's talk about Joan for a minute.  Lincoln I am willing to let go, because children are notoriously horrible characters.  But Joan.  I understand her not wanting to leave Lincoln, not being willing to do it--I understand that 100% and do not fault her for it.  But she acts so stupidly in other respects.  She hides them in a deserted exhibit behind some rocks; the entire time they were going there, I was mentally screaming, "THE OTTERS!  GO TO THE OTTERS!" because Phillips had blatantly painted the otter exhibit as a wonderful place to hide, with concealing waterfalls and ledges and caves, and then never utilized it.  And they're otters; what are they going to do, frolic you to death?  And then there's Joan and her phone.  She has her phone, but instead of trying to reach out to police and give them some information about what's happening inside the zoo, some clue as to her location so help can be sent in (I don't know, through the back, maybe?), or doing anything else useful with it, she just texts her husband, looks at news headlines, and then throws it at the shooters.  And while I respect her love for Lincoln, let me tell you, if my child (*shudder*) had been about to get us killed because he couldn't keep his mouth shut over a dearth of crackers in the middle of an active shooter situation, that kid would have been gagged so fast his head would have spun around.  Kailynn also deserved a good slap, but Joan was the main character, and so my frustrations are mainly confined to her.

I know, I know--people act strangely in situations like this.  But here's the thing: fiction still needs to make sense, and Joan acted like a complete idiot.  And she sat and thought about each move so much, and then still proceeded to do things in exact opposition of what was clearly the best course of action.  So no, she doesn't get a pass because she suddenly found herself in a terrible situation with no clear way out of it.

What is done very well here is that the length of the book matches its timeline, as I mentioned before, and Phillips really does manage to capture the atmosphere.  The setting of a zoo going into the Halloween season was wonderfully done, and while this is no zoo in particular, that also means it can be anyone's zoo.  I definitely found myself hunting through my childhood zoo in my head, looking for a good place to hide, and then moved on to the National Zoo, which I don't know as well--yikes!  Whatever will I do???  Constance vigilance next time I'm there, apparently.

Overall, I enjoyed this, but it's a book in which atmosphere perseveres over plot and logic.  The suspense ebbs and wanes and not always exactly where it should, but I would still be open to reading more from Phillips based on this offering.

3.5 stars out of 5.