Read Spirit Animals 1 – Wild Born free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Brandon Mull's Wild Born is a fantasy adventure for 9 year olds about children who each call up an animal that nobody is supposed to be able to call.
In Erdas, children who turn eleven drink the Nectar at a special ceremony. Most of the time nothing happens. Very occasionally a spirit animal appears and bonds with the child.
Conor is a shepherd's son working as a servant to the earl's spoilt son Devin, to pay off his family's debts. He's only really at the ceremony to do up Devin's coat (all forty-eight clasps of it). Then Devin gets nothing, and a huge wolf with bright blue eyes walks out of the light towards Conor.
That's impossible. The wolf looks exactly like Briggan, one of the legendary Great Beasts. And spirit animals are never the same kind as the Great Beasts.
Far away, Abeke has just been told off for sneaking out to hunt on her birthday. She calls up a leopard with violet eyes, and rain falls on her village for the first time in over two years. Then there's Meilin, a general's daughter who hides her fighting skills under silk and face paint. She was hoping for a tiger. She gets a giant panda (and wonders if it'll teach her anything more useful than eating bamboo).
It's a fun way to meet everyone. Each chapter drops you into a different country with a different child, and each of them is an outsider in their own way. You feel Conor's dread of a noble's temper and Abeke's hurt when her father only sees the mess she's made. And a falcon is still to come.
Meilin's ceremony is interrupted by an attack on her city, and people are killed around her. Her handmaiden falls with an arrow in her back. It's quick and not lingered on, but it's real fighting, not a game.
If your reader is fine with a battle in their fantasy, this is a big, exciting start. A more sensitive child might want to know that chapter is coming.
If they can't get enough of Erdas, Tales of the Great Beasts follows a young king and a strange drink called the Bile that forces the bond with any animal at all.
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