Forever a favourite!

Incredibly well written. The prose of the main character is exactly what one would think of when thinking of a classic English butler. Despite this, the story is slow and I struggled to continue through it. As most sterotypical bulters would seem, it's just a bit dull.

A light read, briefly covering the different stories and research around animals and their emotions and intelligence.

Each story is briefly covered. Any research used is explained by mentioning the researchers names and telling a brief version of what they found as if its another story.

All in all, it's the perfect book for animal lovers who are new to factual evidence of these ideas. I like to read a lot on the subject, usually directly from the scientific papers, so the ideas in the book wasn't anything I hadn't heard before. But to listen to it as an audiobook whilst tidying it was a lovely light listen!

Each chapter of this book covers a different character, loosely connected through attendance at a play or through a character going to it. For the first few characters, I loved it. Yes, some of the characters speak with statements I can't imagine anyone actually saying in such a way but their voice still needed. Yet, after a few characters I started loosing track a touch and as each disappeared I found myself wishing I'd been able to learnt more about the last. This meant that I constantly felt like I'd missed something, despite having read it all, and I found myself uninterested in returning to reading the book in the middle.