THE BALLAD OF TUBS MARSHFIELD

Can a frog and his community survive devastating changes to their swamp?

Tubs Marshfield is on a quest to find out. A musically talented frog who loves his Louisiana home, Tubs reconnects with his beloved cousin Lila after she returns home from medical studies at the Sorbonne in Paris to establish a practice. When Lila begins to notice and track increasingly ill creatures of the swamp, a search ensues for the cause. Along the way, Tubs encounters an alligator witch named Pythia who urges him to leave the swamp and use his songs to reach those who live beyond it. Eventually the source of disease is identified as polluted water from a factory, and Lila attempts to convince the human factory representative that all of the disease it is causing will eventually affect him as well. The swamp wildlife collaborate and rally to fight the changes to their ecosystem head-on, turning desire into action. Hoffman is a former environmental reporter and accomplished adult novelist, but this middle-grade fantasy has some rough edges. Early on, there’s some awkward back and forth between creatures who leave the swamp to enrich themselves and return versus those who choose to stay consistently, and, disappointingly, Hoffman uses nonstandard grammar as a means to differentiate characters of presumably lower educational attainment from others. Songs are spritely and fun.

What the story lacks in plot, it makes up for in heartfelt messaging.