Taster Flight: In Search of Animals

One of the fun things about short ebooks is that they are evolving their own sub-genres. Today's taster flight is an example of that: all three books are about quests to find specific animals. The not too short, not too long length of short ebooks seems to really lend itself to these stories. There is space to provide background on the animal and the motivation for the quest, but not so much space that the story of the search gets boring.

The first book in the flight is the one my company published: Unspotted, by Justin Fox, follows the author's journey into South Africa's Cederberg Mountains in an attempt to see the Cape Mountain Leopard, and introduces us to Quenton Martins, a scientist working to save the leopards.

The next book is set on the other side of the world, in the Pyrenees Mountains in France and Spain. In Bear Mountain, author Mick Webb is searching for one of the few bears that remain in the area, and examines the issues that attempts to reintroduce the bears have raised.

The search in 52 Blue, by Leslie Jamison, is conducted remotely. It is the story of a whale with an unusual song, and the meaning that people read into the whale's story.

Read these three books together to ponder why we go in search of rare animals, what makes us decide one animal is interesting and another is not,and what we learn about ourselves via the search.