[Book] If you give a Pig the White House

3 of 5 stars.

I bought this book because I was curious why it was getting so many bad reviews that contained absolutely no details on it.  As it is, I waited a few days for it to arrive and it is adorable.

Short: This book is basically a parody of children's books like "Go the F*ck to sleep" with adorable art and an excellent summary of all the things that are wrong with putting a pig in the white house.

Medium: It covers an excellent highlight of all the things that Donald Trump (the subject clearly being parodied here) has done wrong while at the same time offering tons of Easter eggs for anyone who follows the white house.  I think the biggest problem with the book is the fact that so many of its best jokes require an extremely high amount of political education for the reader; now granted, who else do you expect to be buying a book like this? Its definitely not for children, but a casual non trump fan will see a pig doing pig like things and immediately reference some of the awful things we all know Trump has done like hang out with dictators but some others are really quite obscure.

Verbose: When you factor in the sheer amount of CRAP there is to make this book from, you can easily appreciate the fact that choosing what makes the best images and the best choice of words would be a challenge, but the fact is, the image of a pig in the white house is indeed apropos but the book barely chooses to go in that direction.  The pig only acts like a pig in 3 of the pages of this excellent 32 page book.  There really are a lot more 'pig' references that they could do but instead its basically Donald Trump being ....Donald Trump.  The language also breaks up the excellent possibility of parody in the sense that while 'go the f*ck to sleep' is clearly targeted for adults, it keeps its reading level designed for an 6 year old, whereas this has more of a 9th grade reading level but much more advanced illustrations.

If the book was simply constructed to piss off opponents of President Trump it does that singularly well, and definitely covers it in a way that exposes their rampant hypocrisy and lies as well as the total moral vacuum by the current occupant of the white house. Some of my favorite pages includes a simple image of him hanging out with "I Like Beer" Kavanagh (without ever naming names) and simply says "Sometimes Pigs like Locker Room Talk" or something along those lines but is obviously powerful imagery and invokes quite well what was wrong with the administration.  The most pig like of images is when he wants more for his meal than everyone else and shows the other two people with him getting absolutely nothing comparatively speaking.

It also does an excellent job of showing how randomly distracted he is, and how utterly unfocused the actual individual it is based on is; randomly tweeting or not paying attention to utterly important things but is a little bit guilty of the things that it is criticizing him of, not showing any disastrous consequences for tweeting while the world is one fire.   It does some gray areas that make sense like him staring right into a solar eclipse but doesn't take the natural bit where the gag could have gone which is making the pig blind for half the book or having whole countries on fire; sure some of that didn't actually happen but this is parody which makes it half the fun for the genre.

The best page of the book is the last one, which does an excellent job of conveying the feelings of anyone who buys it by showing a large rainbow with said pig out on his ass with all his garbage IN the garbage clearly indicating that the pig in the white house will be removed from the white house, but the book could have gone into much greater detail about how the pig got into the white house in the first place or the dangers there of.

There is only so much you can do with 32 illustrated pages, but I think this book wasn't entirely sure what it wanted to be.  I am glad I bought it but am not immediately sure who I am going to recommend it to.  I think finally, the timing of the book failed to wait for the inevitable downfall of the pig and doesn't (obviously) show the Ukraine nonsense that gets him thrown out.

Money well spent but not something I am recommending to anyone but the patriot with a large budget to support artists and authors who had the right  idea even if their execution was a little lacking.