
Now, there are signs that the Devourer may return meanwhile, four children from around the world shock themselves and those around them when they summon the four Fallen Beasts. Greencloaks, those with spirit animals, are an important order that helped defeat the Devourer hundreds of years ago, with help from four Great Beasts who gave their lives to protect Erdas. In the world of Erdas, 11-year-olds must all drink the Nectar to see if they have the rare ability to summon a spirit animal.

I think I will grab them at the library because my boys are always needing new books.Mull (the Beyonders books) kicks off the multiplatform Spirit Animals series with an exciting first installment (volume two arrives in January 2014, written by Maggie Stiefvater). It will be interesting to see where the next books go, since they will be by different authors. My 12 year-old and 10 year-old both read it and liked it, but they didn’t love it. It was slow in some parts, but very action-packed in others. I liked the scenes where the animals chose their children. The concept of the spirit animals is clever and interesting. There is a sense of mystery as you try and figure out which characters are the good guys and which are the bad guys. The bad guys are definitely bad without being overly scary. There are, of course, the few that don’t play nicely and think too highly of themselves. Even though they come from different backgrounds, most of the kids seem to work well together.


I was glad there was a mixture of boys and girls. The kids in the story are asked to do very grown-up things for their age and most of the time they seem to handle it well. This book was ok., It was not as good as some of Brandon Mull’s other books, but it was good.
