Taste of Marrow follows the survivors of the original crew through the aftermath, consequences, and the one mystery barely hinted at in the first story.įinally, apparently one of the things that went right in this universe (hippos are just different) is that women and LGBTQ+ people are much more acceptable than they are in ours. This goes as well as you would expect, with deaths, and life-threatening injuries, to the main characters. River of Teeth is a caper (“It’s not a caper it’s an operation! All legal and above-board!”) in which the feral hippos fenced in at the mouth of the Mississippi are to be released into the Gulf of Mexico. The stories are essentially Westerns set in that universe. Basically, instead of the Wild West, you have the Wild Mississippi or the Wild Bayous or the Wild Delta. Since horses aren’t well-designed for working in rivers and marshes, other hippos were raised and trained to herd the meat hippos. Hippos were imported and raised in the Louisiana bayous for meat.

Congress in the early twentieth century was actually carried out in 1857. The alternate universe in which American Hippo is set is one in which a plan debated in the U. The ending of that story wraps everything up, although there are still more stories that could be told in this universe.

Those stories, the most pressing at least, are told in Taste of Marrow. Although River of Teeth tells a complete story, there are still stories left to tell about some of the characters. I was pleased that I didn’t read River of Teeth before Taste of Marrow was published even if I didn’t read it right away. It did not win the Nebula the Hugo has not yet been announced. Finally, I gave a brief review of River of Teeth earlier, when I reviewed the finalists for the Nebula and Hugo awards. The two short stories, “Nine and a Half” and “Worth Her Weight in Gold”, are vignettes that add color and additional detail to the novellas. The two novellas, River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow, are two complete stories that tell a larger story when combined. American Hippo is not one novel it is a collection of two novellas and two short stories, all set in the same alternate universe.

American hippo by sarah gailey