Spirit Animals – Fall of the Beasts 2 – Broken Ground

Victoria Schwab's Spirit Animals Broken Ground is a fantasy adventure for 9 year olds that splits a group of friends in two, with half of them trapped deep underground and the other half sent off across the sea.

What happens

It isn't a place to start the series. It carries straight on from an earlier book, and the friends already have a lot of history together.

In Erdas, some children are bonded to an animal. Conor has Briggan the wolf, Abeke has Uraza the leopard, Meilin has Jhi the panda and Rollan has Essix the falcon.

Now those bonds are under strain. The great Evertree is rotting, and all the Greencloaks can feel the ties stretching. At one point Abeke calls Uraza and, for a horrible moment, the leopard doesn't come.

Underground, Conor, Meilin and a boy called Takoda are following a pale girl named Xanthe through endless tunnels. She says she can hear which way to go. Conor has a secret, too. A parasite is creeping up his arm, and he keeps checking how far it has got.

Above ground, Abeke and Rollan reach the Greencloaks' fortress to find their friends missing and new orders waiting. They're off to Stetriol, the one place Rollan would rather never see again.

It's a real page-turner. The chapters swap between the two groups, so you're always leaving someone mid-danger. The creature in the caves is genuinely creepy (hundreds of milky eyes in the dark, and they all belong to ONE thing).

But it's the friendships that carry it. Rollan plans his dinner out loud on the boat (stew, then stew again). Abeke won't let Anda, a boy who has lost his own animal, be written off. And Conor tells his wolf everything will be okay, knowing it might not be.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Conor's parasite is quite a dark thread. He feels it move under his skin, hears whispers in his head and is scared of becoming one of the Many, people who have been turned into something horrible. A more sensitive reader might find that harder than any of the fights. For a reader who's already hooked on the series, it's exactly what makes this one so tense.

What to read next

If they haven't met the four friends properly yet, go right back to Wild Born. Conor is a shepherd's son working off his family's debts, and it opens on the day he and the other local eleven-year-olds try to call a spirit animal.