Spirit Animals 7 – The Evertree

Marie Lu's The Evertree is an edge-of-your-seat fantasy for 9 year olds about four friends and their spirit animals heading into the unknown.

What happens

This isn't the place to start the Spirit Animals books. It's the one the whole journey has been building up to, and it picks up straight after some very bad things have happened.

Conor, Abeke and Rollan are at Greenhaven Castle, waiting for the order to march. Meilin isn't with them. She's a prisoner, and something is stopping her mind from being her own. (If that sounds tense, it really is.)

Then Conor starts having the same dream every night. An ape. A cliff. Golden leaves and the shadow of antlers.

One rainy morning Rollan looks through the eyes of his falcon, Essix, and sees Conor sleepwalking along the top of the castle wall. The rescue is brilliant. A falcon's talon hooked in a sleeve, a leopard's jaws on an arm, and a few threads of fabric holding everything together!

The best bit, though, is seeing how much the friends have changed. Rollan used to have a joke for everything, and now he's quieter and wears a green cloak that means a lot to him. Abeke blames herself for trusting the wrong person. Conor is pale and exhausted and doesn't want to worry anyone.

They still look out for each other. Rollan tries to cheer Abeke up by asking her, the Rain Dancer of her old village, to go easy on all the dancing. It doesn't quite work, but she smiles a little.

This one is heavier than the early books. The friends have lost people along the way, and in Conor's dream the spirit animals might not survive the war that's coming. A sensitive reader who loves Briggan the wolf or Uraza the leopard might find that hard to sit with. A reader who's followed the four this far will be desperate to find out.

It's very much a book about courage when you're scared. Around a table of grown-up Greencloaks, somebody finally says out loud that this might be a mission nobody comes back from. Then, one by one, everyone says they're ready.

What to read next

New to the four of them? Go back to Wild Born, where it all starts with a shepherd's son at the ceremony that decides whether he'll call a spirit animal.