Every year or so, videos or photos of a face-off between some leopard and porcupine go viral on the internet. The animals come to blows far more often than you would imagine, and it’s almost like a dance: the leopard encircles, chases or pounces, while the porcupine, when threatened, pulls a reverse and dislodges its viciously sharp quills to pierce the attacker’s skin. It can be a bloody mess, and often in these videos, the leopard is seen nursing its wounds and quietly limping away.

Quills: The Hungry Little Porcupine translates this action into a delightful story about a hungry and nervous little porcupine who crawls out of his burrow at night in search of food. The eponymous Quills is terrified of bumping into a leopard. Every time he’s frightened by a noise — whether it’s his grumbling stomach or the footsteps of a friend — ​“Oh shucks!” he squeals, ​“You scared the quills out of me!” It’s such a charming and catchy phrase that I found myself repeating it through the day after reading the book. 

The narrative takes children right into Quills’ world with vivid descriptions of the topography. The opening scene has the sun setting behind the foothills with the light falling across a ridge and into a small tunnel where it fades into the depths of a muddy burrow. Quills passes a wet thicket of ferns, pink thunder lilies, a forest of rhododendrons and a fallen oak rotting into the ground as he searches for food. A few pages later, Quills and the friends he’s gathered follow a mongoose through a soft green carpet of moss, clearing clumps of rot and overturning rocks in search of cream-coloured mushrooms.

What pulls the book down, though, are the pictures. The shaded pencil drawings of the forest and animals feel too real, and look like they belong more to a biology textbook than a playful children’s storybook. Quills’ appearance is more rat-like than I would have liked, and the wild boar (who Quills lovingly calls ​‘Pig’) has a thick coat of factually accurate but somewhat unseemly coarse hair. Perhaps the idea was to make the natural world more identifiable for children, but in doing this, the illustrations don’t quite capture the endearing mood of the story. This is a pity because some of Shruti Hemani’s illustrations for other books are quite adorable, with characters that have big doe-like eyes. 

Food and friendship are two of the greatest pleasures and comforts in the world, and Quills searching for food with his friends makes for an especially joyful, even dramatic adventure. Helpfully, it’s all rooted in the knowledge of flora and fauna, seamlessly tying in lessons on animal habitat and habits. The quills vs paws climax of the book, meanwhile, offers a takeaway just as important for adult readers — even at your most vulnerable, trust that you’re protected, that survival is often inbuilt, and you can live your life in terror only to find that in the end everything in fact did turn out alright. You’re fine, you’ve got this, you’ll be okay. 

About the reviewer:

Saudamini Jain is a writer and book critic based in New Delhi. She’s currently working on a book of narrative non-fiction, Lost Immigrants (HarperCollins India, 2026), set in northeast India and Israel.