Veil of Shadows

Veil of Shadows by Erin Hunter is a warrior-cat adventure for 9 year olds about an apprentice who is the only cat who can see a ghost. It's a Warriors book, and it is not one to start with.

What happens

ThunderClan is being led by a cat who looks like Bramblestar, sounds like Bramblestar and is not Bramblestar. The real one is a spirit wandering about outside his own body, growing fainter by the day. Only a young apprentice called Rootpaw can see him.

Rootpaw's plan is to prove it. He takes his father Tree up to the Moonpool, where the medicine cats meet at the half moon, and asks them to watch while he calls Bramblestar's ghost into the open.

It goes wrong before it begins. ShadowClan's young medicine cat, Shadowsight, never arrives.

Readers already know why. The book opens with somebody rolling in a patch of catmint to smother his own scent, then attacking Shadowsight, shaking him, and throwing him down a ravine. The only witness is a ghost who cannot touch anything or be heard.

So the cats set off after a scent trail that somebody has deliberately erased, and your reader knows more than any of them. That is a very good feeling to read.

Fair warning about that opening, though. It is a sustained attack on a young cat by a much bigger one, described fairly plainly, and the book leaves him lying at the bottom of the gully. Warriors has always been about cats who fight and get hurt, but this is one of its harder starts.

Which brings me to the catch. Within a page or two your reader is expected to know who Bramblestar is, what StarClan is, why the Clans have stopped hearing from their ancestors, and what the warrior code is for. It sits well into the sixth run of Warriors stories, picking things up once A Vision of Shadows has finished.

For a child already deep in the Clans, that is exactly the appeal. Names they know. An impostor nobody will believe in. An apprentice with a strange inherited talent that half the medicine cats think is a trick.

And there is a lovely bit of craft in the prologue, which is narrated by a cat who chose to stay a ghost so he could keep an eye on his friends, and who now has to watch something awful happen and can do absolutely nothing about it.

What to read next

If your reader is new to all this and you would rather they had the whole thing in order, the very first Warriors book is in the library. A house cat called Rusty walks into the forest, finds four Clans who have been carving it up for generations, and has to decide whether he wants a wild name.