The animals of the world, lead by a vegetarian lion who has read Nietzsche decide to overthrow humans to create a peaceful society.

Oh dear. At loc 73 my inner pedant killed the book for me. This is one of those books where suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I can accept talking animals, and pacts between species (e.g. Farthing Woods and Watership Down) but I’m sorry, the bit where it said a lion chose to be vegetarian for fifteen years…yeah, members of the cat family go blind and die if they don’t eat meat. Vegetarian catfood, at least the good ones, use GM soya to replace the missing taurines, and a lion won’t get that on the veidt. It turned out as I read further, that my pedantry was performing a mercy-kill.

It turns into a tract, with the wise lion somehow knowing the words of the Bible, as do all the other animals: who are atheists. Oh, I stand corrected – he knows how to read. And they have a crown and a throne and…It contains the myth about not knowing how the pyramids were built and credits ants, not Imhotep or Hemiunu. I’m not sure if this is deliberate, but there’s a bit where all the animals start chanting the words “Free will” in unison and all I could think of was Monty Python.

The writing is variable. Some phrases are awkward e.g. “…succeeded to kill” (and again real life intrudes: a lion who kills two men with guns is respected? The Ghost and the Darkness must have been worshipped). “100 hundred” may mean ten thousand or one hundred.

This is not a book for children unless you want to answer some very difficult questions: Apologies for the adult language: Loc 418 has a mouse sexually assaulting a crow, being brought up on charges and fellatio described (although how that act is performed on a cloaca is not something I suspect the author considered).Its sentence results in masturbating itself to death.

This is not literary fiction: it is a basic adventure story. The quality of writing is not there, the plot is simplistic, and morals heavy-handed. The research was not done, and the adult content appears to have been inserted without any real effect on the rest of the plot. The content is too adult for children, but I suspect too simplistic for most adult readers.

I can’t recommend this book.