Fables: Animal Farm

Bill Willingham

After the goodness that was the first Fables book, Legends in Exile, I couldn't wait to dig back into the series. While Animal Farm doesn't quite have the twisted brilliance of Legends in Exile, it's still a worthy successor.

In this volume, Snow White and Rose Red have to travel upstate to the remote farm mentioned in the first book, where the non-human fables are housed. Things have been running relatively well for a while, but suddenly communication is cut off, and on the way there, Snow White discovers some odd things as they're moving into the fables' land. When they get to town, there's no one around. Yep, something very odd is going on.

Where the book suffers-- slightly-- in comparison to the first is that some of the new characters we meet aren't quite as complex or intriguing (I should clarify, however, that many of them are) as those who popped up in Legends in Exile. Everything else about it, however, does absolute justice to the first book. It's delightfully warped, and Willingham has no compunctions about tossing some of fabledom's most beloved characters into the jaws of death without a second thought. The one thing you can definitely say for Fables, at least so far-- it's not predictable.