Martin did one of his first book reports on this book. It may have been the first works of fiction he ever read all the way through, Written by O'Brian when he was quite young 12 or 13? it is a good book of some length for boys who don't go for the typical fantasy adventure or sci fi story. The elements that make it readable are all employed in O'Brian's later books -conflict, adventure, sacrifice, relationships that change and grown and allow characters to influence one another. The imagined world of an imagined creature coming alive on the page is what makes it a page turner, even for a young reader. ( )

This book was written when O'Brian was twelve and published when he was fifteen. For my part, by the time I was fifteen I barely remembered what it had been like to be twelve-- I had a short memory back then. I can only wonder what O'Brian must have thought when, a teenager, he saw this particular story published. It's something that would really only captivate a twelve-year-old, yes-- the plot is about ninety-five percent aimless killing and five percent wry humour-- but it's got an astonishing vocabulary and shows remarkable skill and control for a pre-teen. Even if you calculate for the fact that everyone back then was smarter and better-educated than we generally are today, it's still amazing. Nevertheless, the story doesn't actually have a 'point.' There are also no characters, per se. It's merely a kind of catalogue of what a child might imagine a carnivorous beast's life to be like. In places it's laughably incorrect-- the youthful O'Brien seems to believe that the great cats of the world eat about fifty pounds of meat a day-- but it remains a vaguely interesting curiosity throughout.
Now, don't get me wrong: I love O'Brian. But you must remember that we all started out as stupid little kids, and though he was a cleverer kid than most, this is still a book with little interest of its own. Read it if you're a major O'Brian fan and you absolutely can't get enough of him. If you actually want to read something edifying, don't waste the money on this one. It's a curiosity. ( )

I feel weird critiquing this, as it's something O'Brian wrote when he was 12 and which was first published, under his birth name (Richard Patrick Russ), when he was 15. Because, wow, for a 12-year-old it's remarkably good—already you can see the smooth beauty of his prose. It's also, for a story with an animal (specifically, a panda-leopard—more on that in a minute) as its protagonist and narrator, refreshingly unsentimental and even quite brutal—Caesar's mother and siblings are quickly dispatched by various harsh acts of nature, and Caesar spends a lot of time calmly killing other creatures of the world. It also has moments of being emotionally affecting; when Caesar is captured and "tamed" by humans, I was really quite desperate for him to kill everyone and escape. Yet the tone remains flat and the narrative doesn't amount to much; it goes out on sort of a "huh" note, if you know what I mean. Plus, the aspect that I kept waiting to see explored—that Caesar is a *panda-leopard*, an essentially fanciful creature whose father is a panda and whose mother is a snow leopard—is never touched on at all! In the end, this is much more interesting in light of O'Brian's later work than on any merits of its own. (Though he did write remarkably well for a 12-year-old!)