My stupid intentions

The intelligent animals of Zannoni's zany debut couldn't be further from the gentle beasts of Disney. The guide to this savage natural world is Archy, a beech marten whose first harsh lesson comes when he is crippled by a fall from a tree while stealing robin's eggs. His second comes when his family sells him to a cantankerous and shrewd old fox named Solomon. Solomon teaches Archy to read, write, and fear God; in time, Archy becomes the equal of the forest's wild boars, dogs, and rabbits despite his injury, yet he still worries God has interfered, making him "the only anomaly in a design that was already staring me in the face." After his search for his family ends in disappointment, Archy--recognizing that even Solomon will one day pass from the earth--seeks his own destiny. He comes to know love only to leave it behind, and a battle with a vengeful lynx takes him far from the only hill he has ever known. Taking refuge in the burrow of a particularly obsequious porcupine, he begins to compose his memoirs. In this exciting modern twist on The Wind in the Willows, Zannoni knows when to leave his existential Eden behind and go for the jugular. (June)

Hewn out of the brutality of Watership Down and the trenchant ironies of Animal Farm, this is an animal story for adults. A fable that makes Aesop's darkest seem saccharine, Italian author Zannoni's debut novel concerns Archy, a beech marten (a weasel-like animal) inhabiting a stretch of forest with his small family. With a dead father, a harsh, unfeeling mother, and siblings barely able to make their way through the brush, young Archy can only envision a Hobbesian future for himself: nasty, brutish, and short. When his mother sells him as a slave to the mysterious Solomon, a fox who has set himself up as the woodland's only trader-lender (with the help of his bodyguard/enforcer, a dog called Joel), Archy finds himself receiving many beatings for his clumsy mistakes as well as an odd, intriguing education at Solomon's hands. Gradually, the marten meets other denizens of the forest and discovers life to be nothing less than drenched in the red of tooth and claw. Growing into a stumbling adulthood, Archy wills himself to learn at Solomon's feet, to open himself up to the fox's abusive instruction, which stems from a strange human book, the Bible, which the old trader found years earlier while feeding on the body of a hanged man. In time, Archy yearns to live on a higher, less degraded plane and turns to his painfully acquired writing talents to make sense of the carnage around him. The character of Archy, in all his awkward, vulnerable marten-ness, emerges as courageously as any classical hero. Finding happiness in the arms of a beloved only to have her ripped away, finding stability in the trading post after the death of his master only to be driven from it by interlopers, he is a noble, tormented protagonist striving amid a beastly contingent of the selfish, stupid, and evil. This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations. A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.