He is fascinated by the odd things humans do: An outdoor exhibition captivates him and he is drawn to the “rectangles” hanging in a mysterious new building. He has an insatiable appetite for racing anything that moves and the requisite prejudice against ducks. Johannes is a highly engaging narrator whose exuberance and good nature run like a bright thread through the novel’s pages. He is “the Eyes” of the park and reports to the Bison, who keep “the Equilibrium”: “When there was a new road cutting through the forest … I told the Bison and they decided where and when the raccoons needed to relocate.” His warm, comedic tale of interspecies friendship and the plotting of an “impossible” escape for three venerable Bison who live in a “large fenced-in park within the park” is told by Johannes, a dog. The experience of Eggers’s animals is limited to a small island park patrolled by human rangers and regularly awash with visitors. They made me think of the eccentric way 7-year-olds construct theories and make decisions based on their own limited experience of the world around them.

And, most crucially, no animals symbolize people.” While Eggers’s animals use human language with great facility, he bestows on them the essence of their animal natures. McSweeney’s wood-bound hardcover, $28 Knopf cloth, $18.99 ages 8 and up), Dave Eggers says of his characters, “No animals are real animals. In the foreword to THE EYES & THE IMPOSSIBLE (256 pp. The authors of “The Eyes & the Impossible” and “Big Tree” have avoided this pitfall and created characters who, although they speak with a human tongue, embody the strange magic of other beings. But if the author’s understanding of other species is superficial, the characters’ nonhuman features become little more than a means to deliver jokes. Many children’s authors create animal and plant characters who talk and think like humans.

The circle dave eggers sparknotes