Warriors 2 – Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice by Erin Hunter is the second Warriors book, written for 10 year olds, about a young cat who knows something he can't prove.

What happens

Fireheart's just come through his vigil. He sat out all night in the cold without speaking, and at dawn he stopped being an apprentice and became a warrior. He ought to be enjoying it.

Instead he's carrying two secrets. His friend Ravenpaw isn't dead, whatever Fireheart told the Clan. And Ravenpaw says Tigerclaw, ThunderClan's deputy, killed the deputy before him to get the job.

Graystripe doesn't quite believe it. He points out they've been warriors for about four days, that Tigerclaw's the most senior cat in the forest, and that the accusation drags a dead cat's honour into it as well. He isn't wrong, which is the problem.

So Fireheart waits for a moment alone with his leader, and Tigerclaw keeps finding him another patrol to go on.

Meanwhile WindClan have vanished. The book opens with them, driven off their moor and ending up in a drainage tunnel under a raised road, flinching at the lorries they call monsters and eating rats because the alternative's nothing at all. Winter's coming in. Three Clans are left in the forest and none of them trust each other.

The world's the draw here. Nothing gets explained to you in a helpful voice. Twolegs, Thunderpath, leaf-bare, fresh-kill, StarClan, kittypet. Your reader picks it up the way they'd pick up a language, and they'll be using the words at the dinner table inside a week.

A word on how rough it gets. These cats fight properly. The opening pages have claws opening a nose, blood scattered across the rocks and a warrior lunging at another's throat. A murder sits at the centre of the plot. Hunger, illness and injury are constant, and the deaths aren't offstage. It's never gratuitous and nothing's lingered over, but it isn't a gentle series and it runs and runs.

What to read next

Start at the beginning rather than here. Fireheart only makes sense once you've met him before the forest got hold of him, and that's Into the Wild, where he's an ordinary ginger house cat called Rusty who keeps dreaming about the trees beyond the garden fence.