For my trip to a recent soccer tournament where I refereed, I was looking for a novella that I could complete while driving. Since I would be driving alone, I only had my own tastes to consider. I keep a list of books I am interested in reading. I sorted to those I had tagged as “novella”. When I saw this one, it was an easy choice. I thoroughly enjoyed the author’s first novel The Mountain in the Sea. So I cued this up for my trip.
The book follows a park ranger who is fighting poachers to save the elephants she is an expert on. One hundred years after she is murdered, her uploaded mind is re-awakened to be inserted into the leader of a resurrected mammoth herd on the steppes of Russia. The hope is that her knowledge of elephant behavior can help the struggling mammoth herd to survive. But that is not the only challenge faced by the herd. With the resurrection of the mammoth has come the return of poachers who caused the extinction of elephants in the wild.
The audiobook is read by two narrators, one reading the parts about the park ranger and one reading the parts of the poachers and hunters. This is very effective as is the writing. The book delves into the struggles against elephant poaching and the market for ivory while also exploring what it would mean to be a human mind inserted into a non-human animal. It is a philosophical adventure that I thoroughly enjoyed.
My rating: 5/5
