Bad Badger: A Unique Friendship Story for Young Readers

It’s easy to misinterpret a book; these are interesting times aren’t they? Bad Badger: A Love Story is the sort of emerging reader chapter book that has the potential to be loved, but can also struggle to find its people. At its core, Bad Badger is a sweet story about friendship, but tells the story through a very smart lens with a bigger vocabulary and a more mature, nuanced setting that will reward those who have the patience for it.

The main title will certainly help draw people into the book. Bad Badger sounds interesting, and the fact that its cover shows a detailed, gentle badger drinking tea on a porch, listening to an old phonograph and staring at a seagull is indeed curious. It’s not the sort of topic that is often explored in books aimed at emerging chapter book readers. The subtitle is A Love Story, a topic that doesn’t exactly lend itself to attracting elementary through middle school readers. Those ages normally would go for something humorous or science-fiction-oriented. Bad Badger: A Love Story has many uncommon elements that typically don’t play nicely together, but are in a rewarding package if you give it a chance.

I mention that last bit because tolerance and patience aren’t usually characteristics associated with readers in fourth through sixth grade.

Bad Badger is a book that librarians, teachers, and parents can get behind. I mention that because Septimus, our titular badger, spends the book’s first half feeling like he’s not a badger. Most badgers have spots and he has stripes please don’t be about a badger that thinks that it’s another animal. This is the Pavlovian response that book reviewers and teachers might have as a knee-jerk reaction when a character asks itself it really is the animal as it’s being portrayed. Please don’t be a badger that thinks it’s a duck who falls in love with a seagull.

It’s not. This is the old-school, friends come in many shapes and patterns, so be prepared to look for the good-in-everybody book. It’s also where the book’s subtitle comes into play to complicate things a bit. It’s not a love story as most audiences would think of it. This is more about friendship than romantic love many would infer from the title. Septimus and Gully, the seagull aren’t romantic, they’re just friends who do things together.

They do things together despite their numerous differences. Septimus loves to eat eggs, while Gully, because she’s a bird, lays them, this affront becomes a point of reckoning near the book’s climax. She can get to destinations quicker due to her ability to fly, whereas he needs to take a bike or a cable car. He likes Italian opera and she only communicates by saying “Caw”, because he doesn’t speak her language. Having said all of that, the two become great friends, sharing fabulous day trips and exchanging experiences that build their relationship to a status where the other is missed when they’re not around.

It’s how the story is told that the book will charm audiences. There are instances where fabulously old-school mannerisms and behavior trump the short attention span that people associate with young readers. Bad Badger has that aura within the book. It’s a slow-moving tale about two disparate friends and the comfort that they both develop living in their own skins. The illustrations by Giulia Chigini also have to be mentioned. There aren’t many of them in the book, but when they are there, their soft presence makes you want to visit this sleepy village where anthropomorphic badgers listen to opera on their front porch with their best friend the seagull.

Bad Badger: A Love Story is by Maryrose Wood with illustrations by Giulia Ghigini and available on  Union Square Kids, an imprint of Union Square and Co. Books.

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