What do you think?
Rate this book
Akela
Legend has it that when the first humans evolved, the Ambimorphs were already there, first as our protectors, and then our teachers. Over the centuries we've created separate worlds on the same planet. Every once in a while, those worlds collide.
Akela is a leader among the Ambimorphs, a great teacher of their songs, and the keeper of a prophecy that foretells the sunset of the human race. When a deal with the wrong side goes bad, he wakes up in the desert to find that he's lost three years of his life, his family has been taken by humans, and his community has scattered. With his people on the brink, Akela is offered a fatal choice: he can reclaim his family and save his people, but only at the cost of his heritage and history.
It's Akela's job to protect them, whether they want him to or not.
Akela is a leader among the Ambimorphs, a great teacher of their songs, and the keeper of a prophecy that foretells the sunset of the human race. When a deal with the wrong side goes bad, he wakes up in the desert to find that he's lost three years of his life, his family has been taken by humans, and his community has scattered. With his people on the brink, Akela is offered a fatal choice: he can reclaim his family and save his people, but only at the cost of his heritage and history.
It's Akela's job to protect them, whether they want him to or not.
288 pages, Paperback
Published February 22, 2019
4 people want to read
About the author
Ben Goodridge
16 books19 followersWhile all the other kids in my class wanted to be rock stars, I wanted to be Jessica Fletcher from "Murder, She Wrote." Besides, I could only play keyboards, and there was no such thing as a sexy keyboardist. Still, this was the 1980s. Your mileage may vary.
My first story was published in 1993. My second story was...much better. I've published a bunch of short stories and a couple of novels since then, and I can still play several Duran Duran songs on the piano.
My first story was published in 1993. My second story was...much better. I've published a bunch of short stories and a couple of novels since then, and I can still play several Duran Duran songs on the piano.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 17, 2019
Akela is a novel set at the intersection of societies, but the world Goodridge has created feels much, much larger than even this. The Animorphs - even more so than the Aborigines and First Peoples - have developed an intimate relationship with the land we’ve colonised and claimed as our own. They have seen civilizations come and go and their songs will forever remind them of the transient nature of life.
The California Consortium follows the narrative that Animorphs should be domesticated for the survival of modern man. This is alarmingly reminiscent of the Aborigional Integration policies applied in Australia, not too long ago. This and other issues provoke thought without resorting to excessive violence or sentimentality. Intentions are blurred and one cannot help but wonder. Akela feels relevant to our world - even without the presence of Animorphs.
An overarching theme is the resilience of native peoples to find their own way of survival and integration - at their own pace and on their own terms - to the toxic world we have created around them.
The only criticism of this piece is that readers who want to dive right into the action might find the pace in the first half of the book a bit slow. There is a lot of necessary world-building and character exploration. It is, however, done in an interesting manner so it is never boring and the investment is worth it in the end.
Whereas “The White Crusade” left me wanting, Goodridge is right back on form with this offering. Akela is an amazing book and comes highly recommended. The world is larger than life, the characters are relatable and the issues it raises are topical without being preachy. It is a world that begs further exploration.
The California Consortium follows the narrative that Animorphs should be domesticated for the survival of modern man. This is alarmingly reminiscent of the Aborigional Integration policies applied in Australia, not too long ago. This and other issues provoke thought without resorting to excessive violence or sentimentality. Intentions are blurred and one cannot help but wonder. Akela feels relevant to our world - even without the presence of Animorphs.
An overarching theme is the resilience of native peoples to find their own way of survival and integration - at their own pace and on their own terms - to the toxic world we have created around them.
The only criticism of this piece is that readers who want to dive right into the action might find the pace in the first half of the book a bit slow. There is a lot of necessary world-building and character exploration. It is, however, done in an interesting manner so it is never boring and the investment is worth it in the end.
Whereas “The White Crusade” left me wanting, Goodridge is right back on form with this offering. Akela is an amazing book and comes highly recommended. The world is larger than life, the characters are relatable and the issues it raises are topical without being preachy. It is a world that begs further exploration.
January 26, 2026
An Ambitious Novel Undermined by Place, Perspective, and Structure
Akela by Ben Goodridge
My search for published anthropomorphic fiction led me to find Akela. Published by Goal Publications (now defunct) in 2019, it was also the winner of a Leo Award in the same year.
Akela is a speculative fiction novel that has its origins set in Australia. From the opening chapters, the book is about loss, memory, cultural inheritance, and belonging. It’s told from an Aboriginal boy’s perspective, Kip, and centres on a fictional non-human people known as the Ambimorphs more specifically, Akela Mechanic. It’s inventive, with an emotional core, but where it is strong, it is severely undermined by a lack of geographical, cultural, and narrative accuracy.
Akela, often referred to as a Bushchild, is best described as an anthropomorphic dingo. He has been missing for three years before reappearing in Dorjin Brook (a fictional town in outback Australia) with amnesia and in a feral state. He is clutching a paperback, Cataclysm, with the name Akela Mechanic listed as the author. Kip begins reading it, attempting to find out what happened to his friend.
This section of the novel is the strongest, with the relationship between Kip and Akela being the most believable. It clearly shows the time gap between when Akela left and how Kip has now grown up without him, and how Akela had affected the lives of those from Dorjin Brook.
But to me, this is where the novel started to fracture, especially from an Australian reader’s perspective. There’s a lot of unresolved contradiction that comes through this novel, and whilst it is speculative fiction, it leans heavily on real Australian historical and cultural reference points, the Stolen Generation, for example, and how it’s told through Pop-Pop’s backstory. There’s also the cultural divide between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers. This then moves into more modern-day elements, where the social texture of Dorjin Brook is very Aboriginal, but feels very Western.
Kip and his mob live on the outskirts, and there are heavy Aboriginal stereotypes played into this. The overall theme and setting of the town don’t feel like outback Australia.
But that’s not where the cultural dissonance ends. It dives much deeper into Americanisms. There are imperial distance measurements used instead of metric, for example, miles instead of kilometres. American signage, such as “Sheriff’s Department” on Pop-Pop’s bus, American brand names where Australian equivalents should be used. It doesn’t break the novel’s internal logic outright, but it doesn’t feel like Australia. It feels like an imagining of Australia, or an Americanised Australia. It’s abrupt and scene-breaking in places. Realistically, the only way to read this novel is as if Australia never existed to begin with. If you have any cultural understanding, the novel completely breaks immersion.
This comes not only from what’s told on the page, but geographically, where the outback meets the bush on Sydney’s outskirts, through to the way scenes are explored later in the novel. The entire second half takes place in California, in the Mojave Desert, yet there’s no real distinction between Australia and California. At the same time, there are scene-breaking elements that make it feel as though the characters are in a lush forest in the mountains rather than in the desert.
Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 are the first real shift in the novel, and this is where the flow begins to break, as we move into Akela’s point of view for the first time. We start to learn more about the Ambimorphs and how they’re physically collapsing or being wiped out as a race. We also learn more about the songs of Akela’s people and how they’re used. Songs are massive. They’re not singing in the way a human would sing a song. They’re described more as an author telling a story when someone reads a book. They’re a cultural mechanism that only the Ambimorphs can truly understand, allowing them to traverse their entire history. They can feel, they can see, they can transmit understanding through song, and they can terrify others through it.
While this concept is a highlight and does a lot of heavy lifting in telling the story of the past, there are again scene-breaking moments that undermine the tone the novel is trying to establish. For example, Akela has a brief sexual encounter with a character named Jen, an Aboriginal woman. This moment is interrupted by song, but the scene itself feels disjointed and distracting. At this point, not enough has been explained about the songs for them to feel grounded, especially given their parallels to the Aboriginal Dream time and how they’re being amalgamated into the history of the Ambimorph people. As the novel continues, this cultural alignment becomes increasingly fractured. With the same issues occurring later with another sexual encounter, that feels very abrupt and out of place.
Earlier in the novel, there’s a sense of shared understanding between the Ambimorphs and Aboriginal people, such as the sacred site known as the Sleeping Dingo, which campers have vandalised. But these traditions feel largely superficial, existing only on the page rather than as lived elements of the world.
As we move into the second part of the novel, Akela’s Song begins, starting again at Chapter One. While this is intended as a continuation, it’s initially confusing whether this is a flashback or a direct continuation of the story. It takes several chapters to orient yourself. In the present day, point-of-view characters such as Kip disappear almost entirely for the remainder of the novel. Other characters are introduced, given relevance for a chapter or two, and then vanish. Halfway through the book, another character, Andrea, a journalist from San Francisco, becomes a major focus. The constant point-of-view shifting is distracting.
It isn’t until the final third of the novel that the book begins to find its footing, where everything starts to come together and the story finally understands what it wants to be. Unfortunately, this happens very late. By this point, chapters have become short and fragmented, with frequent time jumps replacing the steady momentum established earlier. Cultural inconsistencies continue to intrude, such as Akela having visions of Australian one-dollar bills, which haven’t been in circulation since the 1980s, falling from the sky.
Akela is not a bad novel. It’s ambitious, imaginative, and built around a genuinely compelling core idea: shared songs of memory and identity. Ben Goodridge has clearly put a great deal of thought into the world and its mechanics. However, the novel is let down by its execution. There is excessive structural looseness, constant point-of-view hopping, geographic inconsistencies, and significant cultural issues that go well beyond minor technical errors. These problems are deeply distracting if you have even a basic understanding of Australian geography, history, or Aboriginal culture.
The novel touches on these elements without grounding itself in them. If anything, Akela is a strong example of why sensitivity readers are important, particularly when writing across cultures you don’t fully understand. There is a very good book inside Akela, but the reading experience is frustrating. Competing priorities, missed opportunities for focus, and immersion-breaking inconsistencies make it difficult to appreciate the novel for what it could have been. Ultimately, I wanted to like this book, but the structural looseness and cultural inconsistency's were deal-breakers for me.
Akela by Ben Goodridge
My search for published anthropomorphic fiction led me to find Akela. Published by Goal Publications (now defunct) in 2019, it was also the winner of a Leo Award in the same year.
Akela is a speculative fiction novel that has its origins set in Australia. From the opening chapters, the book is about loss, memory, cultural inheritance, and belonging. It’s told from an Aboriginal boy’s perspective, Kip, and centres on a fictional non-human people known as the Ambimorphs more specifically, Akela Mechanic. It’s inventive, with an emotional core, but where it is strong, it is severely undermined by a lack of geographical, cultural, and narrative accuracy.
Akela, often referred to as a Bushchild, is best described as an anthropomorphic dingo. He has been missing for three years before reappearing in Dorjin Brook (a fictional town in outback Australia) with amnesia and in a feral state. He is clutching a paperback, Cataclysm, with the name Akela Mechanic listed as the author. Kip begins reading it, attempting to find out what happened to his friend.
This section of the novel is the strongest, with the relationship between Kip and Akela being the most believable. It clearly shows the time gap between when Akela left and how Kip has now grown up without him, and how Akela had affected the lives of those from Dorjin Brook.
But to me, this is where the novel started to fracture, especially from an Australian reader’s perspective. There’s a lot of unresolved contradiction that comes through this novel, and whilst it is speculative fiction, it leans heavily on real Australian historical and cultural reference points, the Stolen Generation, for example, and how it’s told through Pop-Pop’s backstory. There’s also the cultural divide between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers. This then moves into more modern-day elements, where the social texture of Dorjin Brook is very Aboriginal, but feels very Western.
Kip and his mob live on the outskirts, and there are heavy Aboriginal stereotypes played into this. The overall theme and setting of the town don’t feel like outback Australia.
But that’s not where the cultural dissonance ends. It dives much deeper into Americanisms. There are imperial distance measurements used instead of metric, for example, miles instead of kilometres. American signage, such as “Sheriff’s Department” on Pop-Pop’s bus, American brand names where Australian equivalents should be used. It doesn’t break the novel’s internal logic outright, but it doesn’t feel like Australia. It feels like an imagining of Australia, or an Americanised Australia. It’s abrupt and scene-breaking in places. Realistically, the only way to read this novel is as if Australia never existed to begin with. If you have any cultural understanding, the novel completely breaks immersion.
This comes not only from what’s told on the page, but geographically, where the outback meets the bush on Sydney’s outskirts, through to the way scenes are explored later in the novel. The entire second half takes place in California, in the Mojave Desert, yet there’s no real distinction between Australia and California. At the same time, there are scene-breaking elements that make it feel as though the characters are in a lush forest in the mountains rather than in the desert.
Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 are the first real shift in the novel, and this is where the flow begins to break, as we move into Akela’s point of view for the first time. We start to learn more about the Ambimorphs and how they’re physically collapsing or being wiped out as a race. We also learn more about the songs of Akela’s people and how they’re used. Songs are massive. They’re not singing in the way a human would sing a song. They’re described more as an author telling a story when someone reads a book. They’re a cultural mechanism that only the Ambimorphs can truly understand, allowing them to traverse their entire history. They can feel, they can see, they can transmit understanding through song, and they can terrify others through it.
While this concept is a highlight and does a lot of heavy lifting in telling the story of the past, there are again scene-breaking moments that undermine the tone the novel is trying to establish. For example, Akela has a brief sexual encounter with a character named Jen, an Aboriginal woman. This moment is interrupted by song, but the scene itself feels disjointed and distracting. At this point, not enough has been explained about the songs for them to feel grounded, especially given their parallels to the Aboriginal Dream time and how they’re being amalgamated into the history of the Ambimorph people. As the novel continues, this cultural alignment becomes increasingly fractured. With the same issues occurring later with another sexual encounter, that feels very abrupt and out of place.
Earlier in the novel, there’s a sense of shared understanding between the Ambimorphs and Aboriginal people, such as the sacred site known as the Sleeping Dingo, which campers have vandalised. But these traditions feel largely superficial, existing only on the page rather than as lived elements of the world.
As we move into the second part of the novel, Akela’s Song begins, starting again at Chapter One. While this is intended as a continuation, it’s initially confusing whether this is a flashback or a direct continuation of the story. It takes several chapters to orient yourself. In the present day, point-of-view characters such as Kip disappear almost entirely for the remainder of the novel. Other characters are introduced, given relevance for a chapter or two, and then vanish. Halfway through the book, another character, Andrea, a journalist from San Francisco, becomes a major focus. The constant point-of-view shifting is distracting.
It isn’t until the final third of the novel that the book begins to find its footing, where everything starts to come together and the story finally understands what it wants to be. Unfortunately, this happens very late. By this point, chapters have become short and fragmented, with frequent time jumps replacing the steady momentum established earlier. Cultural inconsistencies continue to intrude, such as Akela having visions of Australian one-dollar bills, which haven’t been in circulation since the 1980s, falling from the sky.
Akela is not a bad novel. It’s ambitious, imaginative, and built around a genuinely compelling core idea: shared songs of memory and identity. Ben Goodridge has clearly put a great deal of thought into the world and its mechanics. However, the novel is let down by its execution. There is excessive structural looseness, constant point-of-view hopping, geographic inconsistencies, and significant cultural issues that go well beyond minor technical errors. These problems are deeply distracting if you have even a basic understanding of Australian geography, history, or Aboriginal culture.
The novel touches on these elements without grounding itself in them. If anything, Akela is a strong example of why sensitivity readers are important, particularly when writing across cultures you don’t fully understand. There is a very good book inside Akela, but the reading experience is frustrating. Competing priorities, missed opportunities for focus, and immersion-breaking inconsistencies make it difficult to appreciate the novel for what it could have been. Ultimately, I wanted to like this book, but the structural looseness and cultural inconsistency's were deal-breakers for me.
April 13, 2020
This book is a jewel. It's not just a "furry novel"; it is a good NOVEL, period. The prose is exquisite and poetic; the main character is multi-layered, complex and beautiful in his flaws; it quotes frigging Milton.
More than anything, though, this book oozes maturity and wisdom. The characters in this book have lived long lifes and have things to say about it. No other book deserves a Leo Award more this year.
My only gripe with it is the structure seems a bit too untidy, introducing characters at the beginning only to never use them again (Kip), introducing main characters in the final pages (Merc, Danny and Rollie), ending a character's role by sending them into the sunset only to make them appear again after two chapters for a new epilogue (Powers) and an overall confusing final chapter that feels needless and ruins some of the feeling of brilliance you had been reading.
Despite all this, I was overjoyed to have read this book.
"Jimmy was a Bushchild. The Eastern Bushchildren were tall and lean, and Jimmy had meticulous bronze-colored fur and fiery, golden eyes. His mane was long and flowing. Akela thought he looked like an angel. (...)
Akela rose, suspicious. Jimmy put out a paw, but Akela didn’t take it—not to be rude, but to keep from staining the angel with his grubby grip. A nearly-forgotten fragment of Milton ran through his head: “Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely, and pined his loss.” Jimmy was too beautiful for a crawling maggot like him to touch. (...)
That night, they lay side by side in Akela’s den. He’d chosen a place that was small and well-defended. One almost had to be on top of them to see them. As Jimmy slept, Akela held him, and in holding him felt lonelier than ever. He heard a heartbeat that wasn’t his. He inhaled the scent of fur that didn’t belong to him. He listened to the even breathing of a Bushchild at peace. I could have this, he thought. I could follow him, and be with other people, every day. I could talk to them. Walk with them. Lie with them on cold nights, sing with them to while away the heat of the day. He’d been lonely a long time, hadn’t noticed the loneliness in his grief, and had wound up feeling sorry for himself. Having a pack would have made rough living a lot more tolerable, but he’d neglected himself these past few years. This wasn’t mourning. It was stagnation.
As he rested, he felt his loneliness ebb. It was like the stars emerging from behind the clouds, water flowing through a dry riverbed, the sound of thunder on a silent night."
More than anything, though, this book oozes maturity and wisdom. The characters in this book have lived long lifes and have things to say about it. No other book deserves a Leo Award more this year.
My only gripe with it is the structure seems a bit too untidy, introducing characters at the beginning only to never use them again (Kip), introducing main characters in the final pages (Merc, Danny and Rollie), ending a character's role by sending them into the sunset only to make them appear again after two chapters for a new epilogue (Powers) and an overall confusing final chapter that feels needless and ruins some of the feeling of brilliance you had been reading.
Despite all this, I was overjoyed to have read this book.
October 22, 2021
An enjoyable read with a good voice - Ben Goodridge certainly captures the Australian nature of many of these characters (though I believe the repeated use of one particular word comes from a lack of understanding about how that word is perceived in this country).
A few characters came and went from the story quite suddenly - to the extent that Akela himself barely seemed to be the main character initially. It would have been nice to see some of these characters again, especially Kip, but the strength of Akela's character did help to move on from those left behind by the story.
A few short stories at the end helped to contextualise the conclusion to the story and give a little update on how it all ended. These shorts at the end were actually some of my favourite parts.
A few characters came and went from the story quite suddenly - to the extent that Akela himself barely seemed to be the main character initially. It would have been nice to see some of these characters again, especially Kip, but the strength of Akela's character did help to move on from those left behind by the story.
A few short stories at the end helped to contextualise the conclusion to the story and give a little update on how it all ended. These shorts at the end were actually some of my favourite parts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews