Look Who’s Talking: 5 Great SFF Books with Unusual Narrators

If you like hilarious novels that will also make you cry, this one is perfect for you! It’s about a virus that makes all the humans sick (like zombies), leaving the animals to fend for themselves. It’s narrated by S.T., a domesticated talking crow with a potty mouth (S.T. stands for “Shit Talker”), who sets out into the big world to find a cure. Because if he can find a cure for the humans, he can save his owner, Big Jim, who will then resume feeding S.T. the snack foods he loves. But the world turns out to be a lot more scary and complicated than he expected.

Up next is this freaky novel of Gothic post-apocalyptic horror. I have read it and I still don’t know if I can explain it in just one paragraph, but I’ll try. It’s about an institute that creates doctors to help heal humanity after the apocalypse. And there’s a baron who needs a new doctor, but in his chateau, there’s a battle for power between two competitors looking to take over humanity. And one of them is a parasite, who also happens to be telling the story.

Now is the perfect time to pick up this book, since the adaptation with Jenna Ortega releases in October. She plays Klara, an Artificial Friend, who waits patiently in the store with the other AFs, hoping for her turn to find her forever home. As she waits, and later, gets her chance, Klara explains to readers all the things she sees and feels, making for a surprisingly moving novel about a robot. (And check out the trailer for the film.)

Now, since this is a list of unusual narrators, you might think that with this title, the book would be narrated by a raven. But it isn’t. (And there was already a talking bird book mentioned.) This fantasy novel is even more unusual, because its story of kingdoms, battles, and gods is told by a rock that contains the life force of an immortal god. What’s it doing in there? You’ll have to read it to find out.

And last, but not least, this lovely, award-winning speculative novel of family, grief, and possessions. Benny Oh is a teenager who begins hearing inanimate things talking to him after the death of his father. His travels lead him to the library, where he makes human friends, too, and learns to feel better about the world. And we know all this because this has the most meta narrator of the bunch, since the novel’s narrator is Book, the book itself!