Literature / Legend of the Animal Healer

Legend of the Animal Healer is a fantasy book series by Lauren St. John. It follows the adventures of Martine, a young British girl. After her parents are killed in a fire, she is sent to live on her grandmother's game reserve in South Africa. As she learns to love her new home, she discovers that she is The Chosen One, gifted with the ability to magically heal any animal she touches. With the help of her new friends— Jemmy, a rare white giraffe, and Ben, an introspective boy shunned by the other students— she follows her destiny, saving wildlife across the world.

Though each book is standalone, plentiful continuity references often spoil previous entries in the series.

1. The White Giraffe (2006)
2. Dolphin Song (2007)
3. The Last Leopard (2008)
4. The Elephant's Tale (2009)
5. Operation Rhino (2015)

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This series includes the following tropes:

• All of the Other Reindeer: Ben is shunned for his silence, and Martine for her strange powers.
• The Beastmaster: Downplayed. Martine is trusted by animals, but she can't truly control them, leading to some tense situations.
• Bond Creatures: All animals instinctively trust Martine, but her bond with Jemmy is even deeper. From the beginning they implicitly understood that they were friends, and Jemmy allows her to ride him despite being— in all other respects— wild.
• But Not Too White: Martine is half-African, but feels completely British and has difficulty fitting into the culture her mother came from— especially because bullies at her new school insult her for being too white.
• Death by Origin Story: The series begins with Martine's parents dying in a house fire.
• Elective Mute: Ben is less selective, but still only speaks to his parents and Martine. The other students don't believe he can talk at all. In the second book, he opens up a bit more, and everyone is shocked that he talks.
• Evil Poacher: More than one villain, ranging from outsiders who don't care about the preserve to sympathetic people just trying to feed their families.
• Friendly, Playful Dolphin: The pod of dolphins in Dolphin Song remain friendly throughout.
• Genial Giraffe: Martine's spirit animal is a giraffe. It's later revealed that Martine's bond with Jemmy is what gave her the power to heal.
• Graying Morality: The good guys always remain unambiguously good, but as Martine matures she encounters more criminals with grey or outright sympathetic motivations. Fortunately, she is always able to find a solution that helps everyone.
• Healing Hands: Martine, with the stipulation that it only works on animals. At first she can only barely do anything and has to cover the gaps with regular medicine, but her powers grow stronger through the books.
• Heroic Dolphin: In Dolphin Song, Martine falls overboard during a storm while on a school trip aboard a boat. Several other students also fall overboard, and they are all rescued by a pod of dolphins.
• Mighty Whitey: Discussed. Martine wonders why of all the people in Africa, it's a foreign biracial girl who has the power to heal animals. Grace says that it's her heart that led to her being chosen, and the animals themselves don't see a difference. (Note that The Chosen One is prophecied to save all sorts of animals, not just African ones.)
• Multiple-Choice Chosen: Martine feels guilty about being chosen because she's not native to the region. Her mentor explains that every child has the chance to be chosen, but that Jemmy was looking for one with a very complicated, specific mix of heroic traits. It's not about race, or even moral superiority, but having the willingness and ability to do a very specific job. A job that involves healing animals all across the world, not just African ones.
• Nature Is Not Nice: In one scene, Martine interrupts a pair of dueling antelopes because her child's mind reasons that fighting is bad. A nearby photographer tells her, rather annoyed, that fighting is a natural and necessary part of the species' survival. Also, he's been stalking the herd for hours waiting to get the perfect shot, and now he has to start all over again.
• Only the Chosen May Ride: The Animal Healer is identified by the power to ride a white giraffe.
• Only the Pure of Heart: Played with. Being/becoming the Animal Healer requires very specific proportions of various personality traits, of which selflessness is only one. Grace explains that many children could have done so, but they would had to have been brave enough to ride Jemmy, willing to believe that he was real, and adventurous enough to seize the brief opportunity they had to do so...and so on and so forth, until only one child is the Animal Healer.
• Properly Paranoid: Tendai, the game warden, tells Martine to always keep her survival pack with her in case she needs it. Sure enough, she's shipwrecked in the same book.
• Prophecy Twist: Previous sangoma painted their visions on the walls of a cave. One of these paintings shows Martine at the center of a dolphin pod- which confuses her once she's lived through the event the painting represented, because it did happen, but Ben was next to her during it and the painting doesn't show him. Then she notices a little chip of rock that fell on the painting, and removes it. Sure enough, there's a drawing of Ben behind it.
• Robinsonade: In Dolphin Song, Martine, Ben, and a bunch of mean kids from school end up stuck on an island. At first the mean kids try to take over, but they are soon forced to band together when it becomes obvious that Martine and Ben are the most competent ones.
• Secret-Keeper: Grace, the sangoma. She knew that Martine was the giraffe rider from the moment she was born.
• Skepticism Failure: When Martine was born, Grace warned her parents about their daughter's destiny, and they dismissed her as a superstitious native. Then she pointed outside, where all kinds of animals had gathered outside the fence to welcome Martine into the world.
• Tap on the Head: Averted. A man is bludgeoned into unconsciousness in The Elephant's Tale and spends the rest of the story in the hospital.
• The Unchosen One: Ben has no magic, but he helps Martine on nearly all of her adventures because he's her friend and he wants to do the right thing as much as she does. This is fortunate, because he has patience and survival skills that she lacks.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Ben's focus on intellectual and practical matters puts him at odds with the other children. In Dolphin Song, Martine blows up at him precisely because he's not perturbed by something she hates.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Much effort goes into describing how wonderful every locale Martine visits is- the people, the nature, the food- even as various Villain of the Weeks undermine them.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Grace told Martine's family that she would be The Chosen One, and they responded by taking her back to England to avoid this. Eleven years later, they were both killed and Martine was sent to South Africa.

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