u/MasterBluefire

I feel like the Animals of Farthing Wood TV series is more well known than the books, at least from what I’ve seen online. The books are quite different from the TV series. I enjoyed them, though not all of the books were equally as good in my opinion. The prequel (The Adventure Begins) explains how Farthing Wood lost its status as a nature reserve which is why humans start to destroy the wood. The prequel is pretty brutal and depressing, but it’s one of my favourites in the series. The Animals of Farthing Wood shows how the wood has shrunk considerably because of human activity and the remaining animals decide to leave and the book follows their journey across the English countryside to White Deer Park. The rest of the series follows the animals new lives in White Deer Park and new threats from animals already living in the park who don’t like these newcomers and dangers from outside of it.

So the focus is definitely on the human characters in this series but there’s animals and some of them talk so I’m posting about it here. In my opinion this is a really great fantasy series set in a world where some people get to summon a spirit animal - which is a life long partner that look and act like normal animals but are more intelligent and can become a tattoo on their summoners body. There are also the great beasts which the series centres around. Even though most of the animals don’t talk, they each have a unique personality and they feel like their own characters. Each book is not very long but there are a lot of books in the series, including the sequel series and special editions. There was a online video game that I played a couple of times, unfortunately it’s gone now.

I found it interesting that each book is written by a different author and it doesn’t hide that fact, a lot of other series that are written by multiple people or have ghost writers use a pen name eg Erin Hunter. Despite all the different authors, the writing style and tone is very consistent.

Also, now that I’ve re-read it as an adult, I realise the countries in this world are just fantasy versions of America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, and fantasy Australia is where the villains and conqueror army comes from and as Australian, that is hilarious to me.

A middle school fantasy series about a pegasus called Star with a prophecy: “Once every hundred years, a black foal is born, prophesied to either unite or destroy the five herds of flying horses that live in Anok—fated to become the most powerful pegasus in all of the land.” Theres also a spin off trilogy of this series. There’s a “cast” list at the start of each book with the names of the characters in each herd and a brief description of them which is something I appreciate. If you like Warriors or Wings of Fire you might like this series.

I loved this book, but haven’t read it in a long time. It’s about brumby’s (wild horses) living in the Australian snowy mountains. There’s a lot of Brumby stories by the author, Elyne Mitchell, but I haven’t read most of them. I did find the plots were a bit repetitive though. There’s also a movie and an animated series. I watched the animated series alot when I was younger.

Hi, I just found this subreddit and am so excited to find other people who love animal books, graphic novels and comics like I do. I thought for my first post I would recommend the Detective Beans series by Li Chen. It’s definitely for younger readers but the comedy is funny and the art is great, very cute and vibrant. Anthropomorphic cats are the main characters but there are other animals too.