This collection of stories told by nine different animals by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is heartbreakingly beautiful and poignant. I relish stories with unique perspective and choosing to tell these tales from the mouths of animals such as a donkey, a tiger, and a vulture is very special.

I found each story to hold its own merit and Kolluri's writing to be descriptive and rich. It gave me Aesop Fables vibes in the best way. The stories are about connections between animals and the world and their relationships with people and the environment. The stories feel ancient, like they have been told since the beginning of time in hidden parts of the world.

I am taking off one star only because I expected more of a unique voice for every chapter. I enjoyed the constant voice but a big part of me itched for the fox to sound different than the vulture. That being said, the stories were all enrapturing and I devoured this book within a few hours. I think my favorites were The Good Donkey (though it ripped my heart out!), The Dog Star is the Brightest Star and May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers.

I highly recommend this book when it is released for anyone, like me, who loves fairy tales, myths, and fables. I can't wait to see what the author writes next.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri has given us a beautiful debut collection of short stories, vividly told from the perspective of different animals. There are common themes throughout each piece that touches on the fallibility of living things and the dichotomy of life creating both loneliness and belonging. The author has an exceptional ability to connect the reader to her characters deeply, without wasting a single word. She definitely has a new fan of her work and I look forward to reading her next publication.

I am always on the lookout for stories that teach something about the world and our place in it, stories that shift our perspective while also entertaining. The nine innovative, imaginative short stories in What We Fed the Manticore, each narrated by a different animal, accomplish this in spades.

The stories explore the inner and outer lives of animals and feature different levels of communication and interaction between animals and humans and with different purposes. Some were compassionate and kind, some indifferent, and others self serving. As a whole, the stories serve as cautionary tales that explore the interconnectedness of people, animals, and the environment. The world would be a better place if we acknowledge our connected reality and act in the best interests of all. Talia Lakshmi Kolluri understands this.

As with all story collections, the impact of individual selections will vary depending on the reader. I particularly enjoyed The Good Donkey, The Dog Star is the Brightest Star in the Sky. May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers, Let Your Body Meet the Ground, and also the Author's Notes at the end. I hope you will find your own favorites.

I received a drc from the publisher via Netgalley. Tentative publication 9/6/22.

All of the short stories in this book are written from an animal's point of view. The stories roam from the Arctic to Delhi, from the deep ocean to the Gaza Strip. All of the stories are ultimately about how animals are affected by humans and the tragedies and tenderness that can come from these interactions.

Although the language is not complicated, these are not children's stories. The animals in these stories suffer from things that they do not understand and feel pain and loss. They go deep. After reading many of them I felt melancholy.

This is the nature of the world, though. Human actions affect how whales can navigate in the deep ocean. They affect how polar bears hunt. Wolves are often misunderstood and feared by people, as are tigers.

The author has thought about how animals perceive the world and has worked to get that across in her stories. We don't know exactly how whales communicate, but she puts forward a way that allows us to imagine it. She explains how pigeons might see their navigation maps as strings of color in a way that I found beautiful.

And there is also love in these stories. A dog and its keeper work together to protect rhinos. A man sees that a pigeon has fallen into despair and acts to help the bird. These are stories that allowed me to consider how differently creatures can experience the world and showed great empathy for all the animals that share our planet with us. Although I said the book felt melancholy, it also helped my sense of connection to nature and I do highly recommend it! It's a short book but one to savor.

I was fascinated with this use of the short story — literary, magical, and creative. I’d gladly recommend What We Fed to the Manticore.

What We Fed to the Manticore is a heartbreaking, transcendent collection by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, featuring nine beautiful tales told from the perspective of animals.

I knew this would be a very special collection right from the opening story, The Good Donkey, where a zookeeper in Gaza paints his donkey to look like a zebra to entertain his diminishing clientele. But don’t be fooled by this initially comical concept; this story will rip your heart out and stomp on it.

I don’t want to spoil all the animals in this collection, because I derived so much joy in trying to figure out each of the narrators. But you will encounter a variety of herbivores, mammals, birds, unlikely alliances, and destruction.

The relationships between the animals and humans, or other animals, are the beating heart of all these stories. As Kolluri mentions in her author notes, establishing an authentic level of communication is key to these stories. Sometimes this is verbal, sometimes not, but Kolluri constantly creates a real, hypnotic world.

And if that wasn’t enough, Kolluri shares all her research, so you can take a deeper dive into the beautiful world she has captured. And her aforementioned author notes just make these stories so much richer. Kolluri is truly a special writer.

Highly recommended for absolutely everyone. I would not hesitate to read these stories to my five-year-old daughter, and I know she’d be as enraptured as I am.

TW/CW: War, animal death, animal injury

REVIEW: I was given a free copy of this book by Netgalley and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

I loved this book! What We Fed to the Manticore is a series of nine short stories narrated by various animals. While the stories are separate, and unrelated, they also feed into some interesting themes such as: animals vs their environments, animals vs. man, animals vs. climate change and many others. The stories are for the most part heartbreaking – some worse the others, but they are also stories that stay with you and images and thoughts the reader will keep close to them for quite some time.

What on earth is a manticore? It’s something that can’t be found in any dictionary but the reader does know that this being in one of the nine short stories in “What We Fed to the Manticore” is not benign. All of these stories are told from the perspective of a different animal – donkey, whale, pigeon, tiger, wolf among them. They are fully formed, integrated into their respective environments and for the most part much more appealing than the few humans that emerge. This is no book of children’s tales, though. There is danger, despair and a great deal of sadness.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri says her first and most important inspiration for writing the stories was to learn as much as she could about the environments and behaviors of her narrators, then to place herself inside their lives. She does so beautifully. She is a luminous writer with great empathy for her narrators. Underlying all of these tales is what is happening to the earth; though climate change is never expressly addressed, it plays a role. Humans, needless to say, do not come off well, aside from a couple of tender caretakers.

Kolluri says in her epilogue that she felt her understanding of the world was incomplete because “the inner lives of animals are such a mystery to me.” Through these loving, disturbing, and insightful stories she helps unravel that mystery for us all.

Oh, and the manticore? Well, you’ll just have to read it to find out what it is.

Thanks to Tin House and NetGalley for the eARC.

Thank you, Tin House, for allowing me to read What We Fed to the Manticore early!

I never heard of the book before and it was the cover that caught my attention first. The concept was so original, like nothing I've read before and the stories well mostly spellbinding.

“What We Fed to the Manticore” took me back to the days when I would voraciously read “Watership Down” and similar books with anthropomorphized animal characters. I loved receiving a new, non-human, and internally rich perspective in every individual story in this collection. And no matter what turn these tales ultimately took, whether tragic or uplifting, I found every single one to be wonderfully moving in their own way.