I’m not even sure how I first realized Hollow Kingdom had a sequel. I think I was just browsing Audible and found it, and since I enjoyed listening to Hollow Kingdom so much, I went ahead and bought this sequel by Kira Jane Buxton.
SPOILER ALERT! If you have not yet read Hollow Kingdom, you should really read the book, or at least my review linked above before continuing. Otherwise this review won’t make much sense. I will also be spoiling the ending of Hollow Kingdom, so if that’s something you care about and you have not yet read Hollow Kingdom, go do that first.
If you remember the end of Hollow Kingdom, you know Dennis, the Beloved Beagle, ran into a UPS truck full of infected mofos, never to be seen again. Then some of ST’s owl friends found an uninfected baby mofo for him to care for, ST decided to name her Dee, and that’s where we left off.
Feral Creatures picks up when Dee is about 13 years old. I looked it up, and apparently American crows (which ST is supposed to be) only have an average lifespan of about 7-8 years, and we have to assume he was around for at least a few years before the events of Hollow Kingdom, which probably took up at least a year all on their own. So it’s highly unlikely ST would still be around when Dee is a teenager, but since this book is about a zombiepocalypse and stars a talking crow raising a human baby, I can let his age go if I can suspend my disbelief enough to go along with everything else.
ST desperately wants Dee to embrace her mofo heritage, which is really hard without any other healthy mofos around. It’s also hard to walk the balance between encouraging her to embrace a heritage of “civilized” mofos without putting her in danger of contracting the virus caused by exposure to screens.
ST has no idea how much screen exposure is required to infect a mofo. For all he knows, the virus is living in the technology and just the briefest exposure could infect Dee, so he has all the screens hidden away from her. Why he doesn’t just destroy them is beyond me. I guess that wouldn’t give Dee a chance to discover the screens and give ST a panic attack (spoiler alert, Dee is fine).
Throughout almost all of this book, ST’s one and only goal is to keep Dee alive. He’s come to terms with the fact that she’s the last living mofo and the race will probably die out with her, but he loves her like a parent (he calls her his hatchling). That tends to result in an obsession with keeping her alive at all costs, especially in a world that’s so dangerous. When he isn’t trying to hide screens from her, he’s trying to protect her from hungry bears that are still dealing with the effects of climate change even more than a decade after human civilization has been wiped out. He also has to contend with animals who don’t trust humans because humans are the worst. The ones who are old enough to remember the atrocities committed against them are the ones ST worries about the most.
And yet it’s the three tigers from Hollow Kingdom that Dee manages to tame precisely because they remember their human trainers. Knowing how impossible it is to get a domestic cat to do what you want, I can’t for a second believe that Dee would manage to get these tigers to listen to her, especially so quickly, but it was awesome and I’ve always loved the idea of a pet tiger, even if I know better than to want one in reality.
Hollow Kingdom was really just about ST trying to survive the zombiepocalypse, find some healthy mofos, and free the domesticated animals who were trapped in their homes when their mofos died. The sequel deals with more existential matters, specifically what it means to be there for the ones who are always there for you, and learning to accept what you can and cannot control.
ST had a wing damaged during the events of Hollow Kingdom, which means he relies on rides from other birds, specifically an eagle, to get around, and he’s very demanding about his rides without considering the health of the bird doing him a favor and getting nothing in return. ST also ignores his fellow crows when they call out for help, but he still calls out to them when he needs help (and they answer).
The most important lesson ST had to learn was that he can’t control everything Dee does or what happens to her. He needs another bird to birdsplain to him that, just like ST has always felt more mofo than crow because he was raised by a mofo, Dee has always felt more crow than mofo because she was raised by a crow, and ST just has to accept that.
This all led to a very exciting climax that I won’t spoil because you really should read (or listen to it) for yourself.