Creature FeatureFrom heart-warming to blood-chilling, these are some excellent animal books. |
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 | Allende, Isabel | | City of the Beasts | | The first book in Allende’s magical trilogy finds Alexander Cold tracking a humanoid beast in the Amazon. |
|  | Almond, David | | Secret Heart | | Shy, inarticulate Joe Maloney often dreams of a beautiful tiger, whose significance becomes clear when he befriends a young trapeze artist who comes to town with a shabby traveling circus. |
|  | Bauer, Joan | | Backwater | | Ivy Breedlove, at odds with her upright, uptight relatives, treks into the mountain wilderness to interview a reclusive, bird-loving aunt who helps her carve out a place in her family. |
|  | Browne, N.M. | | Hunted | | A gang of girls assaults the heroine so viciously that she imagines herself a "fox set upon by slavering hounds" right before she loses consciousness. When she comes to, she has been incarnated as a fox (in reality she lies in a coma). |
|  | Clement-Davies, David | | Fire Bringer | | Red deer are the protagonists in this sweeping adventure of battle, betrayal, and ultimate triumph, set in the atmospheric forests of medieval Scotland. |
|  | Dickinson, Peter | | Bone from a Dry Sea | | In two parallel stories, a young female member of a prehistoric tribe becomes instrumental in advancing her people, and a present-day girl visits her paleontologist father on a dig in Africa where they discover important fossil remains. |
|  | Ehrenhaft, Daniel | | The Last Dog on Earth | | Logan Moore hates everyone, except Jack, the mangy mutt that nobody wants. But Jack is in danger! A mysterious disease is sweeping the country, turning dogs into vicious predators. Jack isn’t infected, yet... |
|  | Halam, Ann | | Dr. Franklin’s Island | | This white-knuckle thriller finds three science students stranded on a tropical island, imprisoned by a doctor who is performing horrifying experiments on humans. |
|  | Hale, Shannon | | Goose Girl | | On her way to marry a Prince she’s never met, Princess Anidori is betrayed by her guards and lady-in-waiting, and must pose as a goose girl until she can reclaim her crown. |
|  | Hartnett, Sonya | | Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf | | Australian author Hartnett gives us a mesmerizing tale of a young man fighting his future, a young woman fighting her past, and a mysterious creature who teaches them something about survival. |
|  | Hobbs, Will | | Jackie’s Wild Seattle | | Shannon and her little brother Cody have the time of their lives when they spend the summer rescuing animals for a little-known wildlife shelter, Jackie’s Wild Seattle. |
|  | Hoose, Phillip | | The Race to Save the Lord God Bird | | This amazing book takes a global look at all the factors that contributed to the (almost) extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker. No kidding, this is FASCINATING! |
|  | Ihimaera, Witi | | Whale Rider | | Kahu, a member of the Maori tribe of New Zealand, fights to prove her love, her leadership, and her destiny when hundreds of whales beach themselves and threaten the future of the Maori tribe. |
|  | Koja, Kathe | | Straydog | | Grrl is a feral collie, so savage that no one can approach her cage. Rachel, an animal shelter volunteer who loves all animals but especially dogs, immediately identifies with the stray. |
|  | Korman, Gordon | | No More Dead Dogs | | For expressing his true views of "Old Shep, My Pal," eighth-grade football hero Wallace Wallace earns a detention that takes him off the team and plunks him in the auditorium, where his English teacher is directing a theatrical version of "Old Shep, My Pal." |
|  | London, Jack | | White Fang | | Return to the beloved classic of White Fang, part dog and part wolf, whose life is as brutal as the Alaskan wilderness in which he learns to survive. |
|  | Mikaelsen, Ben | | Touching Spirit Bear | | In order to avoid prison, Cole agrees to an alternative based on the native American Circle Justice, and is sent to a remote Alaskan Island where an encounter with a huge Spirit Bear changes his life. |
|  | Oppel, Kenneth | | Airborn | | Matt, a young cabin boy aboard an airship, and Kate, a wealthy young girl traveling with her chaperone, team up to search for mysterious winged creatures reportedly living above the Earth’s surface. |
|  | Pattou, Edith | | East | | A young woman goes to the ends of the earth on the back of a great white bear to rescue the man she loves in this sweeping epic. |
|  | Paulsen, Gary | | Dogsong | | Russel Susskit, assailed by the modernity of his life, takes a 1400-mile journey by dog sled across ice, tundra, and mountains seeking his own "song." |
|  | Pratchett, Terry | | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | | In this hilarious romp a talking cat, intelligent rats, and a strange boy conspire in a faux Pied Piper scam until they con the wrong town and are confronted by a deadly evil rat king. |
|  | Pullman, Philip | | The Golden Compass | | Accompanied by her animal daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North. |
|  | Rylant, Cynthia | | Boris | | Cynthia Rylant has written a wondrous series of second-person poems to her cat, all of them bright, resonant, and sentiment-free. |
|  | Thompson, Kate | | Switchers | | When freakish weather grips the Arctic and moves southward, an Irish girl and her strange companion save the world from disaster through their ability to switch into animal forms. |
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