Review
WL Rating
I was incredibly excited to read Moby Duck, the true story of 28,000 bath toys lost at sea. On the surface, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Cool, that sounds really interesting.” I mean, the iconic nature of a rubber ducky is a visceral sort of thing, conjuring up happy childhood memories of warm baths, splashing, playing with your parents, etc. But if you step back a moment and think critically about the concept in a long form book, you might start to awake from your daydream to wonder, “Do you really need a book to tell the story?” Short answer: No. About twenty pages into Hohn’s book I started thinking that this could easily turn into one of those New Yorker-type pieces that are beautifully written, but tedious to read. Another fifty pages confirmed it. This book should have been a magazine article and a short one at that. Hohn’s writes well, very well in fact, but the book flits between arcane, loosely linked passages that only serve to demonstrate Hohn’s intelligence, not his ability to create a compelling narrative. The worst part is I actually stopped reading the book, just gave up on it completely, which is something I’ve only done a few times in a lifetime of reading (and I’ve forced myself through some horrible stuff like this). Actually, now that I think about it, the worst part is that I’ll never know what happened to those ducks, and I really would have liked to have known. (April 2011)
Moby Duck - Donovan Hohn
