This is one of those cross-genre books that are poetry and prose, genre and general fiction. Anything with talking animals I tend to class as fantasy, of a sort, which is an anthropocentric view at best, given that they're perfectly capable of communicating with each other, but still. (It's not really fantasy.) Anyway, I can't say that I know much about Kipling other than his dodgy colonial views, but there's an attractive level of eco-consciousness here, an awareness of how dreadful something like seal culling is from the perspective of the seals. It's a read that certainly sympathetic to its animal protagonists, putting them firmly in the forefront, and there's a number of truly memorable images resulting from this - Mother Wolf defending her den from the tiger in the entrance, the abandoned city full of monkeys, the elephant dance...

Everyone thinks of Mowgli when it comes to the Jungle Book, but I remember reading it as a child and being more interested by the big cats, Bagheera and Shere Khan, and that still holds. Admittedly, rereading this for the first time as an adult, the Mowgli stories were all I could remember. The seal story, the elephant story, had quite slipped from my mind, and yet there's some beautiful writing in there. I think my favourite piece in the entire book is the seal lullaby, for instance. "The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee / Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas."