Read Kulipari 2 – The Rainbow Serpent free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Trevor Pryce and Joel Naftali's Kulipari - The Rainbow Serpent is an outback animal adventure for 8 year olds about a frog with no powers at all who keeps ending up at the centre of everything.
It picks up after Darel has already beaten the scorpion lord Marmoo and saved the Amphibilands, so this isn't a starting point. The book says as much about itself in its opening chapters.
It opens somewhere else entirely. A cave of ghost bats, pale and hanging from the ceiling, sent out hunting by the spider queen. She draws her power from dust and dryness and she is turning the wet places of the outback into desert.
Down at the river, a young platypus called Okipippi is being told by her tribe's Stargazer that a war for water is coming, and that only one animal can help. A frog.
Then the bats arrive at the village.
Pippi runs, and what follows is a long frightened walk towards a coast she has never seen, on knuckles that were built for swimming, past two scorpions who would very much like something warm and fleshy for lunch.
Darel, meanwhile, is far off in the foothills, riding a Komodo dragon through a cold wind with the Kulipari squad, looking for a turtle.
The mix is what makes it. There's real danger, and there's also a squad of frogs bickering the whole way there. Dingo asks what you get when you freeze a frog and answers herself. Gee spends a page pretending he can't tell a platypus from a pelican, purely so the small terrified one will stop shaking. Darel is the only member of the squad with no poison and no power, which is exactly why your reader will be on his side.
The ghost bats have teeth sharp enough to kill and they use them on the village, Pippi is bitten, and the Stargazer describes burned villages and wetlands turned to desert. Animals are hurt on the page here, early, not as a late shock.
For a child who finds that upsetting, the opening will be the hard bit rather than something hiding further in. For one who is already happy with a proper animal war, it's a very good one, and the jokes come back quickly.
If it's the ordinary hero standing among the powerful ones that lands, try Spirit Animals - Wild Born. Conor is a shepherd's third son, working off his father's debts as a servant, standing in a square where everybody has turned out to watch somebody else.
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