I Heard the Wolf Call My Name — K.S. Nikakis

From the author of the critically acclaimed The Kira Chronicles trilogy, comes a high fantasy story of gender-fluid shifters set in a beautifully crafted island world of soaring peaks and lush valleys where shining silver waterfalls plunge to the oceans below.Finalist: Best YA Novel, Aurealis Awards, 2019.Jax is just twelve years old and high above his island home in bird-form, when it explodes, killing everyone on it. And then ten years later, he comes face to face with Matiu, his boyhood friend.Matiu is in the military and the military needs shifters for a crucial mission but Jax refuses. Having spent ten long years burying his painful past, he is not about to resurrect it. When the military ramps up pressure to force his compliance, Jax is terribly injured, and flees to the last remaining island of Iolana.High on Iolana's perilous mist-swathed mountain, Anahera is on her vision-quest, that will transform her from Ahi into Ikaika, protector of her people. She seeks her spirit animal but instead of the white-wolf, she discovers Jax. To aid him will destroy her vision-quest, leaving her forever Ahi, but to abandon Jax will condemn him to death. But a greater danger confronts them both. The forces that blew Jax's island out of existence now threaten Anahera's as well and to save it, Anahera must decide what she truly wants and Jax to discover where he really belongs.And time is running out.