Spirit Animals – Fall of the Beasts 1 – Immortal Guardians

Eliot Schrefer's Immortal Guardians is a Spirit Animals fantasy for 9 year olds that brings four old friends back together when something starts eating their world from underneath.

What happens

It opens in a jungle market. A girl called Kaiina summons an enormous elephant as her spirit animal, and she gets only a few minutes with him. A stranger with a spiral scar on his forehead steps out of the crowd, and by the end of the chapter the elephant is a tattoo on the man's chest.

It's a VERY creepy start.

Then we're back with the heroes. Conor, Abeke, Meilin and Rollan each have a spirit animal already (a wolf, a leopard, a panda and a falcon). They've been apart for a while, but Meilin is called home because the great tree that makes these bonds possible is quietly rotting from the inside.

Waiting in the castle courtyard, in chains, is Kovo. He's a huge gorilla the four of them never wanted to see again. A gentle, polite boy called Takoda has summoned him, and Kovo keeps drawing the same picture over and over. It's a door set inside a pair of fangs.

And Conor is hiding something up his sleeve. Literally.

The chapters move between different characters, so you get Meilin's prickly pride, Abeke's calm and Rollan's jokes. There's lots of teasing between them. Rollan tells Conor he's always been disgusting, and somehow that's exactly what Conor needs to hear.

The animals are a joy too. Who wouldn't want a panda that grunts at you every time you're rude to someone?

It's worth knowing that the scary part here is a parasite. A piece of a worm gets into Conor's arm and you watch it wriggle under his skin, creeping towards his elbow. It's properly shivery stuff, and a child who can't stand creepy-crawlies may find it a lot.

For a reader who likes their fantasy with a bit of a shudder, though, it's gripping. These four have clearly been through a great deal together before this book, and it picks up after a long war.

What to read next

If your reader hasn't met them yet, Wild Born is where Conor first drinks the Nectar on the most important birthday of his life, and it's in the library too.