Spirit Animals – Fall of the Beasts 4 – The Burning Tide

Jonathan Auxier's The Burning Tide is the fourth Fall of the Beasts book, a big fantasy adventure for 9 year olds that sails all the way to the bottom of the world.

What happens

It opens long, long ago. A young gorilla called Kovo is sent by his tribe to watch a burning piece of sky crash down onto a sacred tree. What he finds deep under its roots isn't a rock at all.

Then we jump to the present. Abeke and Rollan are sailing south through the Frozen Sea on a creaking ship, crewed by people in red cloaks with masks over their faces. Are they guests or prisoners? Neither of them is quite sure.

Abeke is in a bad way. Something terrible happened before this book starts, and she's barely touched her food in days. Rollan tries his best to cheer her up, mostly with jokes (he'd have been much happier with a nice slow beetle than a falcon, apparently).

Their destination is amazing. A huge volcano wrapped in a glacier, with red rivers of lava running through the ice. Inside is a maze of tunnels carved by ancient priests, built as a trap for something called the Wyrm.

And then there's Yumaris, a blind old seer who's convinced she's an earthworm. She calls Rollan "birdyboy", eats dirt off the floor and sends him leaping out of his seat with his dinner on his head!

Rollan is the heart of it. He's funny and cheeky, and you can feel how much he's worrying about his friend underneath all the wisecracks. Abeke's sadness is handled really gently too.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The villain's prologue has a harbourmaster dangling upside down over the rocks while a rat chews through his rope. The red-cloaked crew have animal eyes and scaly skin, and there are parasites that wriggle under people's skin and take control of them. It's fantasy peril rather than gore, but it's dark in places.

It also leans heavily on the books before it. Characters pop up with very little introduction, and some of the biggest moments from earlier books are simply taken as read.

What to read next

So if Erdas is new to your reader, go right back to the start with Wild Born. Conor and Abeke are both turning eleven, and it's the day they find out whether a spirit animal will come to them.