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thegayngelgabriel 's review for:

The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell
3.0

Soft and strange and lovely in many many ways...and at the same time, the fantasy of a totally sufficient white* heterosexual family in a pristine and entirely unpeopled wilderness to which they have all come within the last generation is a colonialist one. It doesn't stop being a colonialist fantasy because Randal Jarrell wrote beautiful prose.

*The mermaid, of course, is technically not white. Her skin color is not specified but is mentioned as being dark. I do not think this invalidates the above critique.