Endling – The Last

Katherine Applegate's Endling is an adventure for 9 year olds narrated by a creature who might turn out to be the final one of her kind.

What happens

Byx is a dairne. Dairnes look a bit like dogs, except they walk upright, they have thumbs, they can glide from tree to tree, and they can always tell when somebody is lying.

That last one has not worked out well for them. Dairnes are hunted, for their fur and for the trouble a creature who can spot a lie causes a ruler who tells them.

There are twenty-nine left in Byx's pack. She's the runt, the youngest, the one who wanders too far and wonders too often.

There's a word she's afraid of. An endling is the last of a species. She says she isn't afraid to be the first of her pack to die, only the last to live.

Then she slips away one afternoon to look at the sea in daylight, which she's never done, and she's gone from camp for one hour too long.

I'll be straight with you about that hour, because a parent should know before a nine year old opens this. Byx comes back to find soldiers at the camp and her whole family dead in a heap. Her parents are on top, where they'd put themselves. It's a short passage and it isn't lingered over, but it happens in front of you, and everything afterwards is Byx carrying it.

So this isn't a gentle animal story with a sad bit. Grief is the engine of the whole book and the first ten chapters build to that moment.

For a child who can take it, though, what a book. The world is properly imagined, with six governing species and a poisonous ruler called the Murdano, and the voice is wry and small and honest.

Byx also picks up Tobble, a three-tailed wobbyk with beautiful manners who insists he must save her life three times because that's the Wobbyk Code. He's very funny. She keeps threatening to eat him. He is not remotely bothered.

And a poacher's guide, a boy her own age, does something at the cliff that makes no sense at all, which is the mystery she's left holding.

What to read next

If the idea of a creature the world is losing is what pulls them in, the same author has written it from the other side. Katherine Applegate's Willodeen is about a girl who loves the ugliest, smelliest, most unpopular beasts in her valley, and everybody else wants them gone.