Evie and the Animals

Evie is crazy about animals. She knows a lot about a lot of animals. But not only that, she has a special gift. She can talk to the animals. If that sounds familiar, you won’t be surprised to learn that she lives in a town called Lofting. While Evie’s gift is undoubtedly special, it is one she shares with a few other people. There’s her gran; her mum, who is dead; a small boy called Sam; and someone called Mortimer J Mortimer. He appears later in the story, and is the reason Evie’s dad is keen for Evie to keep quiet about her gift. But Evie really cares about animals and can’t resist the pleas of a caged rabbit at school to be released back into the wild. And so the tale begins. Matt Haig’s story moves happily from the completely impossible to the just plain ridiculous, packing in an incident in the lion’s enclosure that accepts that wild animals can be very dangerous, while bombarding the reader with Evie’s store of never ending animal facts, and making plenty of cogent arguments for conservation. The pace never slackens, Emily Gravett is given the opportunity to draw rabbits again (and other animals, including humans), the principal rabbit herself is called Kahlo (presumably because her parents were into feminist art icons) and the story has a finale pitched somewhere between Fantastic Mr Fox (there’s lot of digging) and The Animals of Farthing Wood (if anyone remembers). Altogether it’s great fun.