Review:
This book was one of my son's assigned readings for his freshman English class. I feel like I read it when I was in high school, but I honestly did not remember any of it.
The book is told from the point of view of the animals on the farm and depicts the political events that took place in Russia during the time of the revolution. The pigs are declared the smartest animals on the farm and naturally become the leaders. Napoleon (Stalin) uses multiple forms of propaganda to influence the other animals into blindly following his rule. Napoleon isn't an eloquent speaker and relies on Squealer, one of the other pigs, to persuade the others into thinking "Napoleon is always right." "If Napoleon says it, it must be right".
The pigs methods were not admirable and in the end backfired on them. While the book is rather short, 141 pages, I felt like it was very educational. My son is learning about this same time period in European history in his social studies class and was able to more thoroughly understand the events and the individuals involved after reading this story.
Maybe it is because I am older, but when I had to read these types of books as a high school student, I often found them painful. This time around, I found the writing to be very clever and looked forward to reading each night to see what would happen next.
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