Spirit Animals 5 – Against the Tide

Tui T. Sutherland's Spirit Animals Against the Tide is a fantasy adventure for 9 year olds about four friends and their animals who can't work out which one of them to trust.

What happens

This one comes well into the series. Meilin, Rollan, Conor and Abeke are already deep into their quest for the talismans of the Great Beasts. They've lost one to the enemy. And they've just learned that somebody close to them is passing secrets to the Conquerors.

So they're sailing to Oceanus, where a giant octopus called Mulop has been calling to them in their dreams. Conor dreams of tentacles picking up islands and tossing them about like marbles (which Rollan says is "barely hilarious at all").

The animals are brilliant company, as ever. Abeke's leopard Uraza hates being at sea. Meilin's panda Jhi ambles about calmly getting in the way. Rollan's falcon Essix still ignores him when he shows off. And Conor's wolf Briggan looks at the seagulls as if they'd make a nice dinner.

A seagull turns out to be a spy, too. It dives at Conor's face to try and steal a talisman from his pocket, which is a properly tense moment.

The heart of this one is the suspicion. Meilin has decided the traitor is probably Abeke, and she says so. Abeke is hurt and lonely and quietly thinks about slipping away home. Conor keeps running through his friends in his head, one by one, and can't make any of them fit. If your reader has ever fallen out with a friend and not known how to fix it, they'll really feel this.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The book opens with a very dark prologue. The imprisoned Great Beast Kovo mutters about all the horrible ways he'll kill people. Then a small boy, controlled by another villain, is left on a burning hot rock, and he dies there. It's short, but it's grim.

A child who is easily upset might want to skip ahead to chapter one. For a reader who is already hooked on Erdas, it's a gripping start and tells you exactly how high the stakes are.

What to read next

If they haven't met these four yet, it's much better to go back to Wild Born, which is in the library too. That's where Conor, a shepherd's son working off his family's debts, drinks the Nectar on the day of his big ceremony and finds out whether an animal will come.