Obviously a triumph of scholarship, this work is as compelling as it is interesting, particularly because it is so well written. A comprehensive account of Animal Bride stories from all over the world, many of them painful and many of them sad but all of them intriguing, the book reminds us of an unnatural division that often brings about considerable suffering, unmitigated by the fact that the division is remarkably similar to that which we place between men and women. Even more compelling, at least to my way of thinking, is that these stories seem endemic to our species, and crop up in an amazing array of really very similar folktales indifferent and culturally unrelated parts of the world.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas