Title: Babe: The Remarkable Family of Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox
Author: Roger A. Macdonald
Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
ISBN: 978-1643672236
Pages: 270
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Roger A. Macdonald, author of Babe: The Remarkable Family of Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox, sheds new light on a cherished land and time with a warm and brilliant retelling of a legend we all hold dear.
This tale of Babe and the Blue Ox and his family of origin is forever timely and is definitely a keeper. Let us count the ways. In the ‘original’ version, which many of us encountered as children in grade school, Paul Bunyan, the ultra-capable Minnesota woodsman, champions it out accompanied by his good-natured very massive blue ox, Babe. Yes, blue. The pair are a testament to friendship, cooperation, and living out one’s dream.
Dr. Macdonald’s version embellishes, diversifies, and absolutely quickens the original tale. Macdonald published three other novels, and three memoirs in his lifetime; much is based on the American north woods locale, his familiarity with that territory stemming from a long career as a family medicine doctor in that “neck of the woods.” This blue ox arrives unbidden, carried to young widow Sally McAllfry’s farm on the gusts of a particularly fierce tornado. Remember when Dorothy said, Uh oh, Toto, I don’t think this is Kansas?
It is 1880. Babe didn’t land in Kansas, but the ox did wind up in a very good place: the household of widow Sarah McAllfry, her housemate Florenda (a freed slave), and Florenda’s son Henry. Oh yes: at the outset Sally is a school teacher in East Texas who agrees to teach Henry to read – at the cost of her job, and almost her life. When the local chapter of the KKK finds out about her decision, they attack Henry and his mom, burning down their home, setting the requisite cross on fire on their lawn.
But all is not lost. In the event, the trio become family. More back story: during Babe’s tornado flight, he also rode…a lightning bolt! This bolt from the blue supercharged Babe so that he is fully conversational (in tapped code) with the humans. The three take on a riot of memorable crises and adventures. Henry comes into his majority as man of the house – and he never forgets who taught him to read.
The book is a delight. The characters come across as real; the dialogue is as fresh and convincing as Mark Twain’s might have been in his time. Like Twain’s, downright hilarious, too. The reader senses a love of 19th century America, its history, its people, its language, in every well-crafted page of this book.
Read this book for a contemporary spin on a perennial delight. Film producers, where are you?
