Fierce Kingdom

I get a lot of book recs from r/suggestmeabook and this one came from there—I tend not to read up more on the book than what is stated there and because of that all i knew about this was that people were trapped in a zoo and had no idea this was an active shooter situation. Likely wouldn't have read if i had known that, but I enjoyed it regardless. Maybe it was a good way to get me out of normal thriller categories.

The baby situation was... a lot. I have too many feelings to swallow that and not get stuck, i found myself only thinking about the baby the entire rest of the book after the garbage can situation and was slightly upset to know know their fate.

I read the book over the span of less than 24 hours so i clearly enjoyed it and was hooked. My biggest complaint is that the didn't pull the zoo into the book more, it felt like the book could have taken place anywhere. I wish the setting was more intertwined in the chaos, especially considering the fact that it's not a normal location.

Good, quick read. Kept me hooked. Could have pulled the setting in a lot more. Rude that i don't know the fate of the baby.

I picked up this relatively short and fast paced novel after seeing an online ad for it. It sounded exciting and it turned out to be somewhat less so than expected. The flap doesn't say what causes the mother and her preschool child, at the end of their zoo visit, to “keep on running” for the entire novel. An alien invasion? Flood waters? A lava flow? Since the promoters don't spoil it, I won't either. Suffice to say, what causes the conflict is mainly background to drive a story about maternal love and how much a mom knows and protects her child. Overall, I was generally satisfied with the plot, except for one ridiculous coincidence which moves the story forward, but made me exclaim in disappointment, “Really?” It didn't take me that long to read the book, so this frustration with a plot manipulation doesn't make me regret reading it. Yet, did author Phillips really need to rely on something that would take long odds to actually happen?

Fierce Kingdom is a fast-paced novel that drops you directly into the action right at the start of the book. While at the zoo one afternoon with her young son, Joan sees something at the exit that causes her to retreat back into the zoo (a pretty obvious something). She spends the next three hours hiding in the zoo until the action-packed ending. This was a straight forward book with no twists but was certainly tense. Unfortunately, I never got into it. Joan does things that are nonsensical at times, like throwing her phone as a distraction to the...erm...something...that she's hiding from. She had been using this phone to keep in contact with her husband and, through him, the police. Being in an animal enclosure, one would assume she could have found a rock or something less important in her bag to throw. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, the novel suddenly introduces two new characters in the form of other zoo guests hiding from danger. It shifts from first to third person perspective and we are now expected to care about these other people for whom we have no backstory or history. Surprisingly, they are more interesting and are more well-written than Joan is, but we're shortly back to Joan and her narration until the ending which, while action packed, is too ambiguous to be satisfying.

(Thank you to NetGalley and Viking for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

This is a spoiler-free review
Read on In The Sheets

I picked up this book on a whim while getting shampoo at Walmart, the cover was rad and I really wanted to read a good thriller. I came home, however, with far more than the thriller and shampoo I went in for (and not because I overspent).

Let me start by saying that Fierce Kingdom is, without a doubt, an edge-of-your-seat page turner. Within a few paragraphs I knew I was hooked and would be reading the book in one or two sittings. What I didn't expect was how deeply it would strike a chord with me.

The book follows a Mom at the zoo with her young son when an active shooter opens fire shortly before closing. The entire book takes place over a few short, terrifying hours.

For the last year, my Mom has been quite ill and battling cancer. Though things are now starting to look up, she's had a couple of close calls. While Fierce Kingdom is a thriller it's equally so, if not more so, a book about the unconditional love of a mother and the ends to which she'll go to protect her child.

Even at my Moms worst in the past year, she's been more worried about me than herself, and reading this book right in the middle of all that really hit home. It's not that I didn't already know my Mom loved me unconditionally, I of course did. Fierce Kingdom just showed it in a way I hadn't considered it before.

I know unconditional love in the sense that I love my parents and my family and my dog unconditionally, but love for a child is different in a way I can't fully understand being a single young male without kids.

During a really rough time in my life, this book made me think about things a little deeper and appreciate my Mom and her unconditional love a little bit more. That's an easy 5 stars in my books. No pun intended.

Note to Gin Phillips if she reads this: Thank you.
Note to anyone reading this: If you can, hug your Mom. Or Call her. Or just take a minute to appreciate the person she was or is.

A few quibbles (see below) but this did keep me turning pages. Tension galore as you read to see if Joan can save herself and her 4-year old son from being killed by two young gunman shooting people for sport at a zoo. Along the way they meet two other people who are also trapped inside who wind up providing invaluable help. Read this in one day (only 275 pages) and it's definitely one to check out.

My quibbles were (1) a third gunman (Destin) is seemingly behind the rampage but he never makes an appearance which made him seem superfluous - why even mention him if we never encounter him? (2) the setting is a zoo yet the author makes almost no use on any of the animals. It would have been interesting to see a lion or rhino escape, perhaps kills one of the perpetrators? (3) what in the world took the police so long to arrive?