As much as the setting has cinematic scope, Houndstooth and his crew sometimes feel like screenplay-shorthand, their conversations as economical as a set design, but equally as stiff. That said, I found the characters somewhat ill-served at novella length. 'River of Teeth' is a wonderfully original debut, guaranteed to cast long, sinister shadows over beloved family board games for years to come. All this is deftly indicated in rich, cinematic setting work: the way people ride hippos in and out of waterways the way hippos stalk and threaten the landscape the way the world's vices and virtues have bent to accommodate them. She conveys very well, in a very short book, the length of time since the hippos' introduction, the ways in which hippo-wrangling has changed the character of regions and professions, and the relationship between federal and state governments. I loved the atmosphere and dimensions of Gailey's world. 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. Sarah Gailey's imagined United States, however, are differently fortuned. 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. 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.

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