Book Review: Bunyan and Henry by Mark Cecil

In looking for an image of the cover of this book, I found pictures of the cover of a children's book named John Henry and Paul Bunyan Play Baseball.

Here, take a look:

Giant Paul Bunyan swinging a tree trunk against hard-throwing John Henry? I think I would have liked that book better.

Bunyan and Henry is set in a fantasy-land version of late nineteenth-century America. There's no Chicago, but there's The Windy City. The greatest business in the country involves the mining and processing of an element called Lump. And the greatest financial genius in the country could be somebody called El Boffo.

So you start with a fantastical American and then add in two fantasy elements from real-life America - then change who they are. John Henry is no longer the last person to defeat machinery at the cost of his life - he's a guy who's good with a hammer and is trying to help his family escape to Canada. And Paul Bunyan is no longer the giant lumberjack who was born in Maine and swung his axe across the forests of the country all the way to the Pacific Northwest, he's a strong but relatively normal Midwesterner who mines Lump.

BUT! Paul Bunyan also has something called The Gleam, which is a light that shines telling him where he needs to be and what he should be looking for (which eliminates all agency from his big decisions and makes this more like a video game). And he's trying to save up enough money to buy his mother out of debtor's prison, PLUS save his wife from a deadly Lump-fueled disease.

Don't forget that Lump can be turned into Pure, which is vital to the Orb of some kind, which the Tome either does or does not explain how to make.

This book is not only confusing, it takes a lot away from its main stars. The characterization of John Henry really wasn't too bad - it's a good idea to deal directly with the impact of segregation and post-slavery America (although Henry and his family seemed like they walked out of a better novel - James), but he's not really given a lot to do here. Paul Bunyan, however, could just have been a character named Johnny Futurelumberjack since he has no real relation to the historic tall tale. And the video game-like Gleam makes him more of a passenger in his own story.

That's not to mention how on-the-nose this book is with overt political commentary. Some passages really took you out of the story. Not a fan of how much the politics stand out - and I even agree with them!

So, altogether, pretty disappointed in this one. Five out of ten hot dogs.