The Last Wild 2 – The Dark Wild

Piers Torday's The Dark Wild is a gripping animal adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who can talk to animals and a best friend who's been keeping a secret.

What happens

Kester Jaynes tells this story himself. He's days away from turning thirteen and he can hear animals inside his head (and answer them back). This book carries straight on from The Last Wild, so if your reader hasn't read that yet, start there.

Kester is back home in the city with his dad, a garden full of animals and his friend Polly. Then Selwyn Stone, the powerful man behind the company Facto, arrives by helicopter and leaves Polly a bunch of black flowers.

Every flower is exactly the same, inside and out. And they shouldn't exist at all, because there are no insects left to spread the pollen.

Polly finally tells Kester her secret. Her parents were part of a rebellion against Facto, and they made her promise to protect something called the Iris. She doesn't even know what it is.

That night a gang of kids on glowing electric bikes smash through the front door looking for her. By the time they get upstairs, Polly has gone out of the window on a rope twisted from garden creepers.

So Kester sets off into the city to find her. The wolf-cub follows the bike girl's scent from a glove she left behind, and a very bossy cockroach called the General rides in Kester's pocket.

The animals are the best bit. The wolf-cub is desperate to be taken seriously now that he's nearly grown. The General wants to declare war on the entire human race immediately. A mouse does a worried little dance across a computer keyboard.

It gets dark, though (the title isn't joking). The animals who died in an earlier battle are buried in the garden. A strange white dog across the road opens its mouth to show no teeth and only a stump of a tongue, while whispers chant "The earth will rise!" A girl gives Kester's dad a shock with an electric prod.

If your reader gets very upset when animals are hurt, that dog might stay with them. Kester is also a bit older than a lot of heroes on this shelf. For a reader who loves danger, talking animals and a mystery that keeps pulling them on, it's a brilliant ride.

What to read next

If they're after another child who runs with wolves, try The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell. Feo lives deep in a snowy Russian forest with three wolves, and a general from the tsar's army turns up at the door blaming them for a dead elk.