Review of "The Fox and the Garbage War" by Tuula Pere

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Francis the Fox is back!

And does he ever learn?
Or, rather, does he ever quit?

As we've mentioned before, this series has become perhaps our favorite in our contest's history. Francis Fox is a dynamic character who grabs your attention and dominates every page. He shows flashes of light (mainly ambition and tenacity) which is unfortunately overshadowed by a lot of darkness. It is a darkness that is largely motivated by greed, a thirst for power, and an over-the-top hunger for greatness.

We don't remember Francis Fox being more diabolical than in The Fox and the Garbage War!

Yes, there was the time he took over the city and became the living picture of corruption in the first book. There was the tower that collapsed because he chose to cut corners in engineering and construction. Then there was the media company he wrangled his poor mother into. Then there was the time he swindled a blind badger into selling his beach front property to turn into a "palace." Oh, and who can forget the time that he tried to rig an election for city mayor?

Gosh, maybe Francis was always pretty diabolical—borderline evil.

But something about this book made Francis seem genuinely evil, almost past the point of sympathy (which we usually feel for him).

You know what it is? It's the fact that he should know better by now.
He has already been down this path, he has already tried these types of underhanded schemes, and they have always resulted with his downfall.

But perhaps the thing that troubled us the most about Francis in this book versus the Election Fraud book that preceded it is that he seems to lack a conscience toward the end of this book. See, in The Fox and the Election Fraud, Francis was actually a very sympathetic character who seemed to be developing something he lacked for much of this series: a conscience. In that book, there were times when he felt guilt and shame. There were times he wondered if he had gone too far, yet Flurry (his campaign manager) was there like a devil on his shoulder urging him on. There was even a part of us that felt bad for Francis at the end of the book even after all he'd done. Yes, he deserved to be punished, but it seemed like he regretted his actions.

However, in this book, he becomes like a cold, ruthless, merciless dictator. We're talking like Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il levels of dictatorship. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you get the point. He becomes a pretty frightening character.

With that said, there were some interesting, nuanced character moments, especially in the first half of the book. For example, we're told that "the fox sympathized with his new friend's pain."

And who is his "new friend," you might ask? Well, it's Linda Lupo, a female fox and disgraced former research director from the local university.

Like Francis, she has fallen from grace. Like Francis, she is extremely ambitious. Like Francis, she cares about being known as great and successful. Like Francis, she long to climb her way up to the top, practically by any means necessary. We appreciated that.

The two characters are mirrors for each other. Linda Lupo is essentially Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former founder and owner of Theranos, who was convicted of fraud when her blood testing technology never worked as advertised.

Similarly, Linda Lupo is supposed to be developing a super efficient waste management technology. She schemes with Francis to create a business around it called HypeX around which an entire neighborhood called Stargaze develops. The neighborhood eventually becomes like its own city, of which Francis becomes its mayor.

Think of it like Hershey, PA (which was built around the Hershey chocolate company).

Where this book gets a bit darker is when Francis learns that Linda Lupo's HypeX technology isn't actually working as expected, so he has her locked away in her labratory to work day and night in order to find a solution. To make matters worse, he fires old employees and those who resist, then hires sketchy stormtrooper-like mercenaries called coyotes (who we think were his lackeys in the first book as well). They start outright arresting and imprisoning anyone who disagrees with Francis or who might spill the beans to authorities.

When you think about it, this is genuinely frightening! Like, Francis starts acting like a tyrant.

It's actually a bit of a full-circle moment because he was the substitute mayor in the first book and started acting like this as well. But we don't remember him being this despicable and evil. Part of that might be the fact that Francis should really know better by now, he's been there and done that. He's been given chance after chance after chance to be a good person ever since the first book when the mayor he keeps antagonizing literally took him under his wing. Also, Francis is older now, so he's lost some of that cuteness and naivety that helped to excuse him in the earlier books.

Anyway, similar to The Fox's Tower, this book has a bit of an abrupt, ambiguous ending rather than it being all tied up in a neat little bow. That's ok.

This book continued to give us Francis, perhaps at his worse. We wonder about Flurry and if she'll ever come back. We thought that Francis and Flurry had something going. Yes, they were both villainous, but even villains can fall in love sometimes. Linda Lupo is an interesting addition to the series, and we found her interesting and sympathetic.

We also got to see Mayor Wolf again, which was nice. Unfortunately, he is aging and mostly confined to a wheelchair now, but he's still a big part of this series.

This book definitely kept us at the edge of our seats wondering what was going to happen next with this cunning fox!

Check it out on Amazon!