Warriors 4 – Rising Storm

Erin Hunter's Warriors Rising Storm is the fourth book about the forest Clans, a fantasy for 10 year olds about a young deputy nobody has quite decided to trust.

What happens

Fireheart has just been made deputy of ThunderClan, and almost everything about it is wrong.

He was born a house cat, and plenty of his Clanmates have never let him forget it. He was named a day late, after moonhigh, because Bluestar was too shaken to hold the ceremony properly, and now the elders are muttering that a broken ritual means a dark time coming.

And the cat he replaced is still out there. Tigerclaw tried to kill the Clan leader, was exiled, and left with a promise. Keep looking behind you, he told Fireheart. One day I'll find you.

So it's a book about a young leader who is out of his depth, and it's very good on that. He stands up in front of the warriors to set the patrols and can't remember who's already out with an apprentice. He loses his temper with his own apprentice and knows he shouldn't have. He still talks to a best friend who left the Clan, because he can guess exactly what Graystripe would have said back.

Then there's Bramblekit, a tiny harmless kit with Tigerclaw's amber eyes, and Fireheart flinches every time he sees him. Bramblekit's mother sees him flinch. That whole scene is quietly brilliant.

Be ready for the violence. These cats hunt, kill and injure each other properly, and it's described. The prologue has a Clan dying of sickness, a queen who has lost three of her kits and an owl that takes kits from the forest. Fireheart's memory of a friend who died in kitting arrives in the first chapter. It's never gory, but it isn't soft either.

If your ten-year-old is happy with that, this is a series they can vanish into for a year, and there's a real reason to.

Do start at the beginning, though. The cats have names, ranks, ancestors, herbs, a code and four rival Clans, and all of it matters by book four.

What to read next

Into the Wild is the one to reach for first. It's here as well, and it opens on a moonlit battle over a stretch of rocks, and then on an ordinary kitchen cat called Rusty, sniffing at the edge of a wood he has absolutely no business in.