“Animal Farm” is a Short, Powerful Punch

“Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.”

What an intelligent and quietly unsettling story this was. The underlying tone of warning in the writing was absolutely perfect. It was ultimately a huge metaphor about power being corrupted and Orwell captured this terrifying sentiment stupendously.

When working animals rebel against their natures and drive all humans from the farm, the smartest animals are quick to take over the empty spot in leadership.

It was such a gradual and disturbing change to see Napoleon, the pig, using the other animals’ lack of intelligence to his own advantage. While the animals were slowly starving to death, Napoleon had barrels of milk and bushels of apples to eat. He fed the animals so many lies and, simple beasts as they were, they believed him.

“The only good human being is a dead one.”

The plot was so intriguing and it wasn’t slow at all—I finished it in only a couple of days. I think a lot of readers have a fear of starting classics because they think they’ll be boring, but this one exceeded my expectations by completely absorbing me in the world and delivering so many thought-provoking notions. I can’t wait to pick up Orwell’s 1984.

By the end the pigs had gradually become dictators over Animal Farm and turned it into what the animals fought so hard to escape in the first place—a place of slavery and imprisonment.

This was very much a messagey book, but it was written in such a way that I didn’t mind it at all.

“Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else?”