Animals Rising

A story of survival, changing the status quo, and learning your own strengths, told from the alternating perspectives of the Giant girl, Mira, and the “Wild’ Human boy, Hawk. Mira is a strong willed, and cunningly intelligent young woman who, in a world where hunting, killing, and eating humans is the norm, is worried that the ‘Wild Humans’ are getting hunted to extinction. She sets up protests and tries to get her fellow villagers to only eat ‘Farmed’ humans, until she realizes that Farmed meat and Wild meat are basically the same thing when she spends some time getting to know Hawk. The Humans and Giants are unable to understand the others speech, and so the Giants think humans are dumb animals, put on the earth only for them to hunt and eat. Hawk is a strong, smart, and resourceful young man, who is more at home in the forest than anywhere else. After being attacked and losing a family member to vicious hunters, he breaks into the Giants’ village to find and destroy their powerful new weapon, and soon after he gets captured and turned into a “pet”. In her excitement at finding her own “wild” pet, Mira begins to teach Hawk how to communicate via sign language, which was taught to her by her friend Breena, who is deaf. But communicating with your pet is a very dangerous thing for a Giant, and consequences are severe. Brilliantly engaging, with Page-turning, seat of your pants excitement, surprisingly gory and brutal scenes, with all the moral and ethical dilemmas to satisfy your burning questions of what is right and wrong in a world of cannibals. This book is definitely one for the must read pile! Thank you to the Librarything Early Reviewers Club, and the publishers, Treasure Bay Books, for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.