by Maryrose Wood
2024 / 184 pages
Rating: GOOD/Great/Give

This was a wonderfully strange book that left me wondering where it was going to go next. It is about a badger that isn’t bad at all, though Septimus – that’s his name – thinks he might be bad at being a badger. After all, he doesn’t act like all the other badgers do. For one, he lives in a cottage, near the ocean, not a den deep in the forest. And he quite likes opera, which other badgers are quite indifferent to. So we have this one lonely badger who wears clothes and shops in town amongst the humans and it is never explained why no one else thinks this the least bit odd.

He would like to have a friend, so when a seagull drops by, he invites the bird for tea. But, seagulls aren’t great conversationalists – all Gully (the name he gave her) ever says is “Caw!” But Septimus seems very good at deciphering just what Gully means with each particular caw.

In another quirky twist, Septimus eventually meets other seagulls, and that lot does speak in sentences. It’s such a fun silly journey, with the rules turned all upside down and sideways. Are these animals “people”? Septimus certainly is. But Gully didn’t start off seeming so – it looked like he might just be a regular bird. But then we discover his seagull relatives are “people.”

This is fun, but what makes it a particularly good read, in our present cultural climate, is the lesson Septimus learns about who he is. He is worried he isn’t a badger because he does so many non-badger like things. I was wondering if this book was going to turn into some woke work, with Septimus deciding that he was actually a gull instead. But no, he eventually learns he might be quite the atypical badger, but a badger he remains. And isn’t that good to know?

Bad Badger is, then, a kind, gentle, and counter-cultural little animal tale.