Snowball’s Chance

Fiction. Reed’s first novel, A Still Small Voice, received high praise from an array of writers and critics. Paul Auster called it a fine first novel by a young writer of great promise. SNOWBALL’S CHANCE is far more than a scathing sequel to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, although it assuredly does count as that rarest of things: a successful sequel to a classic work. In a brilliantly conceived and executed riposte to the marketplace’s unthinking cheerleaders, Reed’s Snowball, the Pig ousted from the Animal Farm for rationality, returns to bring marketeering to the farm. While reading SNOWBALL’S CHANCE, one plays this terrifying guessing game of animal clef: Which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbour? Which animal is my enemy? Written in lucid, wise, funny, fable-prose, this book brings to mind Spiegelman’s Maus–the use of a playful metaphor to reveal horrible, frightening truths we might otherwise refuse to see. A scary, engrossing novel, a sustained triumph–Johnathan Ames.