u/MasterBluefire

I’ve seen a lot of posts about this graphic novel so I was very happy when I was able to finally get it from my local library. Like most graphic novels, it’s short, fast paced and was a quick read.
I remember seeing people saying they found the MC annoying, I personally did not, she was a bit childish but she is a cub and does prove that she’s useful. Though I did find it very cliche how the MC is hated by her pack and has to leave because she’s got white fur (seriously why do so many wolf stories feature the MC being kicked out for being different?). I enjoyed following her journey, there’s exciting action scenes and interesting settings with a wide variety of animals. I wish we got to know some of the other characters better though, I feel like there’s a lot of different characters introduced and we never find out much about them, I can’t remember most of their names. I liked the overall sketchy art style and designs of the characters at least.

The tone of the story was weird to me, it’s simultaneously dark, with lots of visible blood and discussions on grief and letting go of guilt, but then you’ve got a pallas cat sidekick who is basically nothing but a comic relief who shouts his own name, generally childish humour and some dead characters are given x eyes, how am I supposed to take x eyes seriously? It doesn’t ruin the story for me, but it does feel inconsistent. I believe there’s a new book coming out next year, so hopefully it will improve this.

Also, there’s this weird blacked out speech bubble, page 138, but I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it so it might just be in the copy I read

I guess I’m going through a phase of reading animal books set in different time periods, this one is set in England during the Blitz. It’s for junior/middle school age range, and you can tell by the simpler writing style but it wasn’t so childish that I couldn’t enjoy it. The main characters are a dog and cat who are left behind by the children who own them when they are evacuated to the country. Eventually, circumstances convince them to travel to where the children were taken. An overconfident messenger pigeon leads the way, and he’s a really fun character.

At first I didn’t particularly like the way the book seemed to go with the trope that cats hate humans while dogs will do anything for them but it didn’t end up staying that way. The dog and cat’s dynamic reminds me a bit of Mittens and Bolt from that Disney movie.

Also this book made me think of something, do you prefer it when all species can understand each other or not? I like seeing different species interact with each other and getting to learn about different perspectives but it does raise the question that if they can all understand each other, why can’t they talk to humans and all species have different ways of communicating, so it would make more sense if they had to learn each others language. I like both, I think it just depends on the story and how realistic it’s trying to be.

I only read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when I was a child but I recently finished the whole Narnia series and it’s… interesting. I don’t hate it but the pacing is really weird, with very slow travel scenes, taking about wanting to eat, eating etc but then when more action plot points actually happened, they were resolved very quickly and not very satisfactorily. Also, yes, Aslan is lion Jesus, I personally don’t mind, I liked him as a character but you can’t overlook the Christian allegories as it’s an important part of the series story and world building.

What I did like are the talking animals (stylised as Talking Beasts or Animals) since there is at least one in each book and are actually a major part of the world building. I found it interesting that they’re seen as equal to humans and live like humans but also don’t wear clothes and have animal habits, sounds and behaviours, like being nocturnal and eating their respective food. I was wondering if it’s acceptable for Talking Beasts to eat other Talking Beasts but the lore is that animals from other countries and other parts of Narnia can’t talk and are called dumb animals and so can be eaten and used for labour. There’s a scene in one of the books where the characters are unknowingly served a Talking Beast to eat and feel sick and horrified when they find out after it’s too late, with one of them literally comparing it to eating a baby. But Talking Beasts can devolve into dumb animals if they become morally corrupt or choose to live like a dumb animal, so I guess in the world of Narnia, you could eat someone who was formerly sapient which is kind of dark but is also why it’s my favourite concept in the series. I don’t know of any other books that explore the idea of a world with intelligent and dumb animals/creatures.

Did anyone else read the Narnia books or watch the movies?

I highly recommend Dogs of the Deadlands. It’s a newer animal book that happened to catch my eye at my local library. It’s set in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and follows the story of Natasha, a little girl who had to leave her dog, Zoya, behind and Zoya’s puppies, Misha and Bratan. It has multiple POVs which are used to reveal information in a satisfying way. The book is more like a saga than genre fiction, as it’s about Natasha and Zoya growing up separately and the challenges they face, as well as their inner thoughts and emotions rather than trying to peruse some specific goal. I suppose for the dogs, their goal is simply survival.

The animals are realistic and minimally anthropomorphised, they don’t talk to each other, they operate on instinct and emotion. So the only dialogue in this book is in the human POV chapters which are a lot less frequent and are are shorter. Despite that, the animal POV really gets into the characters thoughts, emotions and what they’re experiencing. I think that’s why I still enjoyed the book, because I usually don’t like books that don’t have a lot of dialogue.

I think this book is more for general audiences, it doesn’t feel like a children’s book. It’s like Watership Down, Black Beauty or Call of the Wild, where children can read it but some of the language, depictions of violence, frequent death and themes are more mature. Dogs of the Deadlands made me tear up a few times and I would definitely read it again.

Some art is scattered throughout the book, nothing that outstanding but I like having visuals of what characters look like

A fantasy series about an anthropomorphic brother and sister rabbit getting dragged into a war between rabbitkind and the Lords of Prey (large hawks, eagles, falcons) who are conquering their lands and enslaving and eating their kind. There’s also a wolf faction under the command of the Lords of Prey and the “dragons” which are their own faction and are actually Komodo dragons which I think is pretty cool, since I’ve never seen Komodo dragons in any book before. There’s a lot of great art throughout the books, I included some examples and there’s some spin off novella series. I believe it’s promoted as being a Christian series, but it doesn’t have explicit religious theology in it that I noticed. It’s for junior/middle grade readers and I would compare it to Redwall.

I think the worst thing about the series though was the pacing, it was incredibly slow to me and I’m sure the main story could have been told in three books, rather than four. It doesn’t help that writing style is not the most engaging, I think it’s because there was alot of exposition. I’m trying to avoid spoilers but there were some romances in this book and they just kind of came out of nowhere so I didn’t care about their relationship at all.

I really like a lot about the series but it definitely could have been so much better which makes it hard to recommend.

I wasn’t interested in the twisted tales novels but then I saw there was a Lion King one and decided to read it. It’s definitely for younger readers, I guess I thought Twisted Tales would mean that the writing would be more mature and the ending would be dark, but it’s not. The story is set six months after Mufasa’s death and Simba is also presumed dead but because they never found his body, Nala still has hope he might be alive. The first half of the book is about how Nala’s life has changed since Simba left. The second half follows her travelling to find Simba, though as a cub rather than a young lioness like she was in the movie.

Random thoughts:
I didn’t find the other cub characters very interesting. I did really like Scar’s POV, you see how cunning he is and how he’s always doing things that he thinks will benefit himself. I was worried it would try to make the reader sympathetic towards him. I liked seeing more of Sarabi and her POV, though I feel like she talked too causally, with “ums” and “ahs” and “okay.” She had a more mature, dignified way talking in the movie if that makes sense.

Overall, I thinks it’s a good book for Lion King fans, especially because it shows that time period of Scar being in control of the pridelands.

I think I might be the only one who knows about this book because I’ve never seen it mentioned in discussions online. It’s a short junior fiction novel and from memory, it wasn’t anything amazing but I enjoyed it at the time. It switches between human and dinosaur POVs which made it memorable to me. I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs are never given names, though I guess it makes sense since they are written in a realistic style, rather than anthropomorphised.

This is the synopsis:
“Set on an outback fossil dig in Australia the story weaves together two narratives. One is that of 12-year old Ellie, as she faces a girl called Peta who is scarier than a gang of fossil thieves.

The other is the real-life narrative of a small ornithopod dinosaur that lived on the same site as the fossil dig, 95 million years earlier.

Although separated by time, Ellie and the dinosaur are bound together by place and fate. Both will face adversity with courage and determination until they meet in a fateful confrontation with fossil smugglers in the Australian outback.”

Anyway, I just want to know if anyone else has read or at least heard of this book?

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.