Father, Son and Other Animals

Peta’s Review

Sometimes books seem to find you. This is definitely the case with Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals (2024). I think it was the engaging illustration of the emu with two chicks on the cover which drew me to it.

Father, Son and Other Animals is published by Cordite Books, an independent not-for-profit small press. Zoë Sadokierski’s work as a designer, writer, creative producer and professor in Visual Communication at the UTS School of Design accounts for the wonderful illustrations in the book. 

Through a combination of illustrations and anecdotes, Father, Son and Other Animals explores the issues of climate change and species extinctions through the lens of parenting and the recent Covid experience. Aware of the planet’s looming environmental crisis and despite her growing anxiety about the future, Sadokierski wanted to find hopeful stories to tell her young son. Throughout the book she pays close attention to the bonds that humans share with the natural world. As a parent, she finds herself looking back on her own childhood, a time of tooth fairies, flying reindeer and the sheer joy of hearing the warble of currawongs at dusk. 

While Sadokierski’s concern with impending environmental catastrophe might make the book sound bleak, this certainly isn’t the case. She offers beautiful moments of tenderness, reminiscences of her father’s connection with the animals and wildlife on their farm, and touching moments when drawing with her young son Raph. Acclaimed environmental writer James Bradley’s Introduction praises the book’s complexity and intelligence, describing it as one that shows us how “we need to find ways to live and celebrate as well as to mourn and rage.” Father, Son and Other Animals is a gem of a book, or in Bradley’s words, “a small marvel.”

Publisher’s Review

'I want more books with the complexity and intelligence of Father, Son and Other Animals. Not just because we're going to need them if we're to find ways of processing and commemorating the transformation of the world, but because we need to find ways to live and celebrate as well as to mourn and rage.

The book's sophisticated interweaving of text and image, grief and humour, wisdom and bafflement does just that, capturing not just the dislocation of our historical moment, but also the bonds of love and care that bind us to each other. Simultaneously painful, funny and profound, it is a small marvel of a book. Father, Son and Other Animals allows us to glimpse the degree to which the slow catastrophe of the pandemic and its reshaping of our world was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger derangement of both human and non-human life that is being driven by human activity.' - James Bradley