It is 298 pages, priced at $19.99 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. I ordered a copy shortly after it was published.Īmerican Hippo was published by Tor.com on May 22, 2018. River of Teeth (2017) was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards the sequel Taste of Marrow was published by Tor.com the same year. Last year Tor.com published both in a handsome omnibus edition, American Hippo, which also included two new stories and a brief timeline if you know what a sucker I am for omnibus volumes, you know how irresistible this book was. I loved the atmosphere and dimensions of Gailey’s world… River of Teeth is a wonderfully original debut, guaranteed to cast long, sinister shadows over beloved family board games for years to come.

Unfortunately for them, one man is quite invested in the hungry, hungry hippos remaining precisely where they are - and the bad blood between him and Houndstooth goes back a very long way. He assembles a motley crew of hippo wranglers - with ancillary skills involving demolition, poison, disguise, and murder - to assist with the job. government to get the feral hippos out of a marshy, dammed up stretch of the Mississippi River. Winslow Remington Houndstooth, former hippo rancher, current ne’er-do-well for hire, accepts a commission from the U.S. Luckily for the United States in our timeline, the fact that hippos are ill-tempered apex predators not amenable to being ranched was pointed out, the American Hippo Bill failed to pass by a single vote, and consequently, we don’t have hippos casually chomping on passers-by due to a lack of their usual forage. Sarah Gailey’s imagined United States, however, are differently fortuned. Broussard proposed an ingenious solution to both those problems: Import hippos to eat the water hyacinth then, eat the hippos. At the same time, Louisiana’s waterways were being choked by invasive water hyacinth. In 1909, the United States was suffering a shortage of meat. In her review of the first volume, River of Teeth, NPR reviewer and former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar said: Sarah Gailey’s alternate history of an American west overrun by feral hippos is definitely the latter. There are books that I ignore until I get a solid personal recommendation, those that win me over only with rave reviews, and those that I warm to, like, immediately.

American hippo sarah gailey