(+++) NOT ALL THAT TRASHY

Trash Animals: The Animal Weirdos We Secretly Love. By Rachel Federman. Illustrated by Clare Faulkner. HarperCollins. $12.99. 

     This looks like one of those little hardcover gift books, and the cute Clare Faulkner cover illustrations of a squirrel, opossum, skunk, fox, pigeon and raccoon – each holding up a numbered placard from 1 to 6 – reinforce the first impression. But what Rachel Federman offers inside the book proves that first impressions can mislead. The gift-book-ish stuff appears at the start on pages labeled “trading cards,” and includes more than the six animals portrayed cartoonishly on the cover; but the rest of the book has a significantly more serious side, acting essentially as an apologia for animals of whom many people apparently have low opinions but really shouldn’t. 

     Actually, the whole Trash Animals enterprise is a trifle difficult to sort out, even when Federman conveys interesting information. Take those “trading card” pages, for example. At the bottom of each is listed a “trash animal superpower,” and ok, that’s fine. But each “superpower” is ranked between one and five stars, and there is no clue as to why. The opossum’s power of playing dead gets one star, the skunk’s potent spray gets three, the beaver’s dam building receives two, and the Norwegian rat gets three because “eyes can go in opposite directions, and they can swim” (presumably “they” refers to the whole rat, not just the eyes). The little brown bat gets four for echolocation and the common crow gets four for intelligence, while garter snakes get two because they “smell through their tongues and grow their whole lives.” Exactly what creates these rankings, and to what end, is never explained. 

     The rest of the trading-card information is basic scientific stuff whose seriousness is somewhat at odds with the amusing illustrations. Scientific name, class, family, geographical range, diet, size, lifespan and other facts are offered here. Then the rest of the book gives still more information, presented in pages whose contents are rather arbitrarily assigned to one chapter rather than another – actually, the single chapter called “Fun Facts” pretty much encompasses the whole book, despite the existence of “History,” “In the News,” and other chapter titles. At the end, the attempted cuteness of the “trading cards” returns with a “Trash Spirit Animal Quiz” that is supposed to help readers determine whether they are raccoons, pigeons, snakes, skunks, or rats. Apparently other animals discussed herein – badgers, crows, squirrels, etc. – do not appear in “spirit” form. 

     It would be easy simply to say that Trash Animals is all in good fun and to let it go at that, forgiving the inelegances of content and presentation because it is, after all, just a little gift book. But the problem is that it really wants to be more than what it looks like. Federman has dug up all sorts of animal trivia that she presents in a hodgepodge. One two-page spread, for instance, includes facts about badgers, Norwegian rats, crows, Norwegian rats again, and squirrels. Another starts with bats, moves to pigeons, then badgers, then beavers, and then extinct badgers. This scattershot approach, with its absence of rhyme or reason, is mixed with short items about “trash animals” on social media (of course), in serious art (Picasso’s nine oil paintings of wild pigeons), in literature (Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tale of Mr. Tod), on film (Disney’s Enchanted, Hitchcock’s The Birds), and so on. There are also sections intended to “redeem” these animals – the book’s title suggests that people generally think of them as somehow “trashy,” although who other than Federman thinks that way is never explained. The “Planet Protectors” portion of the book explains that bats eat insects and spread seeds, snakes keep mice under control, and squirrels’ seed-burying propensity results in trees such as walnut and hickory, which means “squirrels contribute to our efforts to battle climate change by supporting forest growth.” The points that Federman wants to make are, first, that “trash animals” are not “trashy” at all, and second, even if they are, their “trashiness” makes “these outside animals, routinely cast out from basements and backyards,” pretty neat anyway. The book’s whole trashy-but-not-really stance is emblematic of its rather confused presentation: Federman seems not entirely sure of how serious to be or how much of an advocate to become. Faulkner’s cartoons push Trash Animals toward the light side, but the rather shaky nature of the text’s viewpoint makes it hard to be sure whether this gift-like book would be more appropriate for genuine animal lovers or (more likely) for social-media-obsessed observers who think outlandish online animal scenes and memes are, in Federman’s words, “super cute.”