Teenagers: behind the banter, the tediously repetitive games and clicks, the moping and screaming, the fast living, and the jockeying and preening lie the rules of the entire animal kingdom.

Based on their popular Harvard University course, latest research, and worldwide travels, Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers examine the four universal challenges that every adolescent on our planet must face on the journey to adulthood: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy, how to court potential mates, and how to leave the nest. Safety, status, sex, and survival.

For parents and children, predators and prey alike, this is a powerfully revelatory book, entertainingly written. To become, as its reader does, for a while, a young penguin or a young humpback whale, or even an octopus tapping a shrimp on the shoulder or an orca silencing their victim, is a giddying experience. The authors open up horizons for their ordinary human readers as they go about their daily animal lives, and permit them to look afresh at the confusing and exhilarating experience of adolescence. Even your average teen will not get bored.