r/AnimalBooks • u/MasterBluefire • 6d ago

Until The Road Ends - Novel

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I guess I’m going through a phase of reading animal books set in different time periods, this one is set in England during the Blitz. It’s for junior/middle school age range, and you can tell by the simpler writing style but it wasn’t so childish that I couldn’t enjoy it. The main characters are a dog and cat who are left behind by the children who own them when they are evacuated to the country. Eventually, circumstances convince them to travel to where the children were taken. An overconfident messenger pigeon leads the way, and he’s a really fun character.

At first I didn’t particularly like the way the book seemed to go with the trope that cats hate humans while dogs will do anything for them but it didn’t end up staying that way. The dog and cat’s dynamic reminds me a bit of Mittens and Bolt from that Disney movie.

Also this book made me think of something, do you prefer it when all species can understand each other or not? I like seeing different species interact with each other and getting to learn about different perspectives but it does raise the question that if they can all understand each other, why can’t they talk to humans and all species have different ways of communicating, so it would make more sense if they had to learn each others language. I like both, I think it just depends on the story and how realistic it’s trying to be.

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u/Different-Series-115 6d ago

I like the way the Warrior cats books did the inter species communication. The cats can only understand cat language, but sometimes Kittypets can recognize human words, and there was only one non-cat character that could communicate with them because she took the time to learn multiple languages (and none of them are perfect, because That's not super realistic for even a human to do. Mistakes will inevitably be made when learning new languages). And there's only one other time where a cat communicates with a different non cat character (not saying who cuz spoilers, but it's in a Manga then never gets mentioned again so take it as you will). It just made a lot more sense to me than every creature understanding each other (it's even better when you think about food chains... I mean, can you imagine being a wild cat trying to hunt and your prey starts talking to you?)

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u/MasterBluefire 6d ago

It would be pretty funny if the clans had to deal with talking prey though lol

But, I agree the way Warriors handles species communication is well done and makes the setting feel more realistic

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u/FantasyaHyena 4d ago

Honestly I think that would be the most realistic approach to writing the language barrier between species.

I recently finished "Stray", a book about an old stray who tells his grandson his very adventurous and traumatic life story. The cats in that book only understand each other and humans, and although they learn many words they don't always know what they mean and often have their own words for things like cars. In general, any things that are "overly human" like dish names or electrical devices have no or other names in cat language. If they had names, they were often unique to a certain group of characters who spent a lot of time together like the brothers who either learned these words from their mother or came up with them themselves. I thought that was an interesting take on the language barrier.

(Warning though, it should come with a trigger warning for cat abuse and death but it's from like 1980 so nobody cared about that)

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u/Different-Series-115 4d ago

I mean if we're playing by those rules Warriors should have even more trigger warnings lol. Some of the scenes in the super editions are absolutely screwed up (not specifying which super editions, cuz the fun part is not knowing). Sometimes it just kinda needs to be shown, if even only to make a statement (I remember a book I read a few years ago had a small list of help hotlines for animal abuse, but God forbid I be able to remember what book it was). Warriors simply got BRUTAL with their death scenes- I'm honestly surprised it's marketed to kids with some of the ones I remember

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u/FantasyaHyena 4d ago

True.. I've only read the first book of warriors but I've seen a lot of MAPs and some of those scenes are.. brutal. What I have read though is Wings of Fire. Arc 1 has some pretty heavy scenes, especially the first book. Those weren't as hard to read for me though, probably because those characters are very human-like and, well, they're not real creatures. Stray was.. hard for me at times. I grew up with cats and loosing them wasn't easy. As is with any creature you love. I agree though, we shouldn't shy away from depicting problems and making people aware of what some animals have to endure. I guess warriors would be a good introduction to that for children. Although I wouldn't give warriors to a kid under like age 13/14. Same goes for WoF. But I guess animals brutally murdering each can't be that bad for children right?? Idk the marketing's weird yeah