First Past the Post: 'Seahorses in the Olive Jar' by Barb Kirpluk

I wanted to pick something special for the inaugural entry to my new project ‘First Past the Post’, where I seek out unique and interesting books with zero reviews and become the first person to rate them! I trawled through quite a few great contenders, which I will get to, but when I found Barb Kirpluk’s absurdist novel about taxidermied crow puppets coming to life, I knew it was the one for me. Having read it, I’m very excited to be this book’s first reviewer!

First of all, I love both the title and the cover. Kirpluk is also an artist and she painted the cover herself, and it is absolutely gorgeous! It really suits the tone of the book and was very eye-catching. The story follows Walter and Dervish (plus some extra crows), a clay sculpture and puppet respectively who come to life and embark on some wacky adventures. I have to say, if you aren’t prepared to go into this with a very open mind, I wouldn’t recommend it. This is the height of absurdist writing, where there are no rules for what may happen. This applies to story beats, plot structure, everything. 

That being said, I had a lot of fun with this book. It was a really unique reading experience for me and once I let myself go and just accepted wherever Kirpluk took me next, I really enjoyed it. The characterisation was very strong; these crows have been crafted with love, and that is obvious from the writing. The prose itself was also great – there are some really insightful moments and clever humour in here. ‘The remembered smells of wet earth and worms’ (ch. 7) was a particularly lovely-sounding phrase I noted down. I also love ‘don’t buy meat from a vegetarian butcher’ (p. 70) as a suggestion on who to take advice from. The book is filled with fun and creative turns of phrase like the latter one here which I thought were great. I do think there are times when Walter and Dervish’s personalities and emotions are a little over-explained as opposed to coming through in their actions, but this could be easily fixed by trimming those sections and focusing slightly more on body language or behaviour that demonstrates how they are feeling more subtly. 

For me, the strongest part of this book narratively was towards the end when Walter goes on something of a soul-searching journey, meeting a variety of animal friends along the way. It really cemented the idea I had while reading that Kirpluk’s writing style would lend itself extremely well to children’s books. She has a great knack for conveying difficult emotions in a simple and lighthearted way through her animal characters which I think would work great for young readers (the Wolf-Dog character is a perfect example of what I mean here – that was so heartbreaking!). The thing I enjoyed most overall, however, was just the sheer joy and passion radiating from every word in this book. It is so clear that Kirpluk writes from a place of pure creative pleasure and truly loves the characters she has created, which makes it a really lovely experience to share in that joy as a reader. I have since visited her blog, which I will link at the end of this review, and found the real-life inspirations for each character as well as the continued stories of Walter, Dervish and friends. 

I had a blast with this and I hope this review will encourage other people to give this book a go. Again, I have to stress – this is the most absurd of absurdist fiction, so if you’re not down for that, you will not like it! But for me, it was a pleasure. What a weird, wacky, silly, lovely gem to stumble upon for the first review of this new series.

Barb Kirpluk's blog: https://crowstales.blogspot.com