The Pack

September 1, 2017

Gr 7 Up-The adventures of animal-shifter Flo continue, as she and the remaining shifters who survived the labs and the hunters in The Wanderers are now searching for a safe home. Horse-shifter Flo and bear-shifter Jett have been together their whole lives, and have never known anything outside the circus. Now that the circus has been destroyed, they and a small group of shifters who survived the vicious fights in the first book are searching for somewhere they can disappear from civilization and live in peace; they need to avoid EOS, the hunters who will capture them for the labs or kill them on the spot. One of the pack has heard that Rat, a prisoner of some wild shifters in the mountains, knows the way to a safe camp, so they set out to find and rescue him. While Rat does lead them to a large, flourishing pack, their hopes of a new life are dashed just as they arrive; they had been followed by hunters, and the huge colony is attacked. The high action starts from the first page, which may be confusing for newcomers to this world. Little background is given and there's a large cast of characters to follow, making it difficult to read this book as a stand-alone. VERDICT Purchase where the first volume is popular.-MaryAnn Karre, Binghamton, NY

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2017
A group of shape-shifting runaways from the circus, on the run from genocidal hunters, tries to find a home.Flo, her boyfriend, Jett, and the other shifters just want to find a strong pack to join. The teenagers (all either white or with no identified race) can all shift into an animal form: bears or tigers, parrots or rats, elephants or horses. The frightened escapees, who've lost many of their loved ones to hunters, have been seeking some safe place in the woods. The members of this huge cast (with too many names and animal forms to keep track of) have a wide array of agendas. Should they join the wild pack? The wolf pack? Should they even stay together? After brief dramas, many of these newly introduced characters vanish, never to be heard from again. Finally, Flo and the shifters are captured by hunters, who are in league with the lion who used to run their circus, who'd been betraying them for years and who now seeks to strike a bargain. Further dramatic revelations and betrayals await, of course. There's no attempt to summarize the events of The Wanderers (2015), and with so many characters, side quests, and double crosses, it's often difficult to keep track. Even those who loved the first book might find too little logic in this conclusion. (Fantasy. 13-15)

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