The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share by Emma Bland Smith

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Reviewed by: The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share by Emma Bland Smith Elizabeth Bush Smith, Emma Bland The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share; illus. by Alison Jay. Calkins Creek, 2020 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781684371716 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* 6-9 yrs Two wars have been fought with England on American soil, and now in 1859, on the Northwest Coast island of San Juan, war number three is about to erupt. [End Page 145] The first shot is fired by an American settler at a pig rooting in his potato patch; tensions escalate as the pig’s British owner demands unreasonable compensation for the deceased porker. Settlers write to their to their local authorities, who in turn send for military support. Cannons are mounted and aimed and the harbor fills with warships, and a squabble over harsh words and a dead pig turns into an international dispute over poorly delineated boundaries in the Salish Sea. President Buchanan calls for a negotiator: “Hastily (or as hastily as possible for a time when it took six weeks to cross the country), General Winfield Scott arrived to help the two sides work things out.” Smith deftly captures the retrospective absurdity of this historical incident with deadpan narration that will have young audiences slapping their foreheads in mock dismay over the childish behavior of hotheaded adults. Jay adds absurdity of her own in her visual parody of nineteenth-century art—portly, self-important men straining at their buttons, rendered in the dusty hues and crackled surfaces of naïve folk art and portraiture. An entertainingly conversational author’s note, period photographs, and timeline are included, as well as an illustrator’s note on her fictional flourish—the departed pig’s tombstone. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois