Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Song of the Summer King by Jess E. Owen.

Sometimes when I'm trying to decide if I get a book, I check the Goodread reviews. This line on one of the reviews sold me:

The gryphons feel like REAL animals. They don't have magical powers. They aren't impossibly built and they are limited by the strength of their bodies and minds.

The story is centered around two prides of gryfons (gryphons), each of a different type (one land-based, the other more sea-based). Heads of eagles, bodies of lions, winged. And a really cool idea: They could be any color an Earth bird could be in. Brown, black, grey, white... but also bright green, shining red, vivid blue.

One pride was "conquered" by the other. King killed, adult males killed or driven off, nearly all the babies/young ones killed. (They're delightfully lion-like -- the females do all the hunting, too!)

The main character, Shard, was the only young one permitted to live. Shard was the conquering king's son's wingbrother (sworn brother, brother by choice), so the king tolerated him. Barely.

The story was just so wonderful as Shard struggled to try to be accepted by the king -- the gryfon who killed his father and most of his own pride, the gryfon who was trying to wipe Shard's breed of gryfon off the planet.

This story reminded me a lot of Clare Bell's Ratha's Creature (one of my favorite books ever). This author even used "Named" capitalized to mean intelligent or self-aware: Animals were Named or they were witless.

It also had a really strong feeling of the movie The Prince of Egypt: Two brothers who were really close, but one was of the ruling class and had all the power, while the other was of a conquered people.

This is a self-published book, but it's really well written and edited. There was only one annoying aspect of it: Like too many other authors, Owen used "murmured" to death. Why are authors so obsessed with that word? She used it so often in the final two chapters, I was so distracted from the story I couldn't even enjoy it.

On to the next book of this four book series!