The best books starring sentient animals (that not enough people know about)

The longer you write fiction, the harder it becomes to ignore its mechanics and get swept away in a story.

But KA swept me away and right off a cliff. Mostly known among writers for his novel Little, Big, John Crowley's KA is a shining opus that reflects back humanity's relationship with stories through the eyes of Dar Oakley, a crow whose life, destiny, and very nature becomes entangled with those of the story-telling humans who fascinate him.

KA is a sprawling, slow-burn of a novel, starting with Crowley's detailed portrait of crow culture and morphing into the multi-part tale of Dar Oakley's transformation from an ordinary crow into a being who has seen too much.

For every reader who has ever felt like Dar Oakley—the accidental star of a story who becomes trapped by it, uncertain how to get out—this one's for you.

Zucchini the ferret, born in the Bronx Zoo, leads a bleak life.

When he learns about the outside world, he yearns to escape—but when he does, it's straight into chaos.

I read Zucchini many times as a child and last read it in my 30s, and it's wonderfully more grimdark than I remember. Published in 1982, the book is 1980's-New-York gritty, and so are the hard adult lessons: fighting for your needs is full of risk; betrayal is common; love, compassion, and understanding are scarce; and idealism has an unsustainable cost.

But this makes the bits of joy that Zucchini wrests from the world all the more vivid. The story, like the world, is hard; but the story, like the world, has hope.

In Paul Galico's The Abandoned (copyright 1950), 8-year-old Peter is transformed into a kitten after a mysterious accident, befriends an older stray, and learns how to behave as a cat as he teaches his new friend about the occasional goodness in people.

I grew up with cats and was obsessed with all things feline, and I couldn't resist this story, in its charmingly British voice, that explained to the reader how to properly behave as one; nor, I imagine, could many other younger cat lovers if they knew about this book.

(Because it if happened to Peter, maybe it could happen to us, and we ought to read this how-to, to be prepared. You know… just in case.) 

Technically, Brooke Bolander's The Only Harmless Great Thing is a novella and not a novel.

But this story, set in an alternate universe in which hyperintelligent elephants are forced into toxic factory work, packs so much pathos, vivid description, and (especially!) the world-building around elephant culture—I swoon over the voice in which the elephants tell their stories and myths to the reader—it may as well be three times as long.

This is the most modern book on my list, and it did get some excellent critical attention, including the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. But Bolander's voice of the elephants alone (to say nothing of the other voices, each masterfully different) is so danged magnificent, the more people know of this work, the better.

Tom Shachtman's Beachmaster, in which the sea lion Daniel Au Fond becomes obsessed with deciphering the fragments of an ancient legend—or is it a key but semi-forgotten piece of sea lion oral history?—hit my young world in the midst of my own obsession with "The Cryptic Prophecy" fantasy trope.

Marine mammals are an uncommon choice for sentient animals in fantasy, and all this plus my own permanent obsession with exploration meant that the vast, literally ocean-crossing scale of this story, with its multiple and differing sentient animal cultures, made it irresistible.

Luckily for me, Beachmaster is actually the first book of a trilogy (followed by Wavebender and Driftwhistler), so this was only the beginning. (Consider this paragraph a vote for all 3.)