Love: The Lion by Frédéric Brrémaud, Federico Bertolucci
My rating: 4/5 cats
damn you, diminishing returns!
i did not love this book as much as The Fox or The Tiger.
the artwork is as spectacular and the encounters between predator and prey as dispassionately brutal as in the first two books
but i must confess, i found the story difficult to follow. like the two previous books, it’s all told through images, with no words to guide the reader; and in The Fox and The Tiger, there were some moments that confused me, but i was able to follow the story with no problems.
here, and maybe i’m just lion-racist, but i was losing track of which lion’s storyline was which. maybe it’s clearer in the actual book than it is in the digital copy i’m reading off my computer, but i require distinguishing characteristics on my male lions so i can understand who is fighting whom and which lion i’m rooting for, because there are a LOT of lion fights and it got muddy.
sometimes literally!
i understand which lion opens and closes the book, but the various middle narratives are less clear.
but confusion aside, this is a wonderful book, just gorgeous
i loved the lions roaring at the crocodiles
and the hippos bellowing at the lions. ‘scuse us, lions, coming through here!!
i loved this beautiful cheetah, although this is pretty much all you get of her
i loved the armadillo surprise!
i love when prey fights back:
boom
and boom! (although the consequences of this particular kick were heartbreaking)
i love the bullying hyenas, even though hyenas are nature’s worst invention (there had better not be a hyena volume of this series planned)
and of course, man has to go and ruin things for everyone towards the end, but it at least made for some striking and memorable imagery
so, beauty beats out story and it gets four stars cats, and if anyone wants to explain it to me, or draw little family circus-style dotted lines mapping out the various storylines, i would be very grateful.
sorry about the picture quality—it’s hard to photograph on my computer sometimes. i will try to clean it up if i ever get a spare moment.
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