Animal Farm By George Orwell

Do you ever stop for a second and think what domestic animals thought of us, human beings, what hatred they had in their mind for us because we kept them and made them work in farms? This book is a fable all about how the animals of Manor Farm stir up a rebellion against humans and capture the farm. It all started with the old pig called Old Major giving everybody an inspirational speech one night on how miserable their lives are at the farm with humans. The major also made a rebellion song called The Beasts of England. After some weeks the Major died, but the rebellion continued quietly with the pigs leading, until one day they put it into action and kicked out the humans. The animals celebrate their victory and change the farm’s name to Animal Farm, and the farm has a happy and successful year ahead with a good harvest with Snowball, the pig, as leader. When Snowball was leader, he wrote the Seven Commandants, he brought such wonderful tactics into action when the owner Mr Jones attacked the farm again, but an evil plot was hatching in the mind of Napoleon, the evil pig. Napoleon trained these nine fierce dogs to send Snowball off the farm for ever. Then the most evil act occurred -- Napoleon held a meeting in which he said whichever animal had to confess something should confess it now. However, Napoleon set the dogs to go off with the heads of whichever animal did confess.

Napoleon also broke the Seven Commandments, but every time he broke a commandant his followers would add an extra word to the Commandments and nobody would notice. Whenever an animal would get old or get ill Napoleon would kill them, for e.g. the devoted and very hard working Boxer (the horse) got ill and Napoleon sent him off to the knacker’s. At the end there was a very shocking surprise (which I am not going to reveal to you).

Review time: the book is pleasant in the first few chapters then goes evil. You get really angry at the last chapters because they’re way too cruel and it’s not happy -- it’s sad stuff. At the end of the day, this book tells you that whoever is in charge ends up behaving like cruel humans. So this is not a great book for small kids, you have to be above 10 to read it, but it is a book with a lot of twist and turns.