The Talking

Sixteen-year-old Tara Bennet awakens to the voice of her cat, Boris. But Boris isn't meowing. He's saying actual words! In English! And he's being snarky. Suddenly, magically, every animal on the planet has acquired the power of speech. Pets are chatty with their owners and birds gossip in the trees. In zoos, animals beg to be released, and those on factory farms destined for slaughter cry out for mercy. Civilization is thrown off-kilter, and factions rise up to confront the chaos. Against this tumultuous backdrop, Tara Bennet and her friends try to live their lives as normally as possible. But in a remarkable twist of fate, Tara is pulled into the center of the cyclone. Her aunt, Chloe, a professor of herpetology at Dartmouth, has a pet chameleon named Pixel that claims to be in telepathic communication with a mysterious entity behind the phenomenon. There is powerful opposition to the talking animals, and when it becomes clear that Pixel's life is in danger, Tara and the others seek help from US President Atticus Hayden. But soon it appears there will be a war between humans and animals, with terrible destruction and loss of life. The Talking presents challenging ideas in the mode of a page-turning thriller, with characters—some of them four-legged, feathered, or scaly—who are wise, witty, flawed, and truly memorable.