Roy MacGregir
Tundra Books
2014
162 pages
Boston Breakout is a kids novel about a hockey team, the Tamarack Screech Owls, who travel from Ontario to Boston to play in a hockey tournament and get mixed up in animal liberation. Hockey's boring so I skipped all the hockey parts of this book to get to the animal liberation parts. One of the Screech Owls, Samantha, gets mixed up with a group of animal rights activists who, unknown to her, are planning to free the penguins and everything else from the Boston aquarium by blowing the thing apart so all of its water, and the animals that live in it, flow into the Boston Harbour. Samantha believes in the animal liberation cause but not the tactics so when she sees the activists she's made friends with interfering with the animal count she goes and tells on them so that their plan is stopped before any good can be done.
The book was pretty good if you skip the hockey and if you ignore the dumb statements about zoo animals preferring the zoo. If I had one little tiny critique, it would have to be about the ending, its all wrong: I would have changed it so the activists successfully pulled off their plan to destroy the acquarium, all of the animals would have flowed out into the habour and thrived there. I would have written the animals as playing a role in obtaining their freedom from the aquarium. Then, in my version, over a period of millennia, the wind would erode the city of Boston down to gritty ruins and the networks of roads and infrastructure would crumble from the growth of plants and trees and the effects of animals, sun, snow, and rain. The city of Boston would become a nameless wild, home to a strange colony of North American penguins. That would have made a much better ending for this book.
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