Warriors 5 – A Dangerous Path

Erin Hunter's A Dangerous Path is the fifth Warriors book, a forest adventure for 10 year olds about four clans of wild cats and the two things closing in on them at once.

What happens

Fireheart is ThunderClan's deputy, and he is doing a leader's job because the leader can no longer do it.

At the full-moon Gathering he watches his oldest enemy take over ShadowClan. Tigerstar has tried to kill him more than once and murdered a deputy to get the post, and he has just been handed a clan and nine lives by the warrior ancestors themselves. Nobody outside ThunderClan knows any of that.

Back at camp it's worse. Bluestar has decided StarClan has abandoned her. She orders patrols the clan hasn't the warriors to fill. She looks at Fireheart for a heartbeat as though she cannot place him, and then asks whether he is going to betray her too.

And something else is loose. The book opens away from the cats entirely, in a compound where a pack of dogs is scraping a hole under a fence. They get out. They run into the forest with one thought between them.

The world is what makes this series. Fresh-kill, Twolegs, leaf-bare, a camp being rebuilt out of thorns after a fire went through it. Your reader will have the vocabulary in about ten pages and then it belongs to them, which is a large part of why these books get read in long greedy gulps.

This is a properly violent series, though, and it's worth saying plainly. Cats die, and the deaths are described rather than skipped. A medicine cat has recently killed her own son to protect the clan she was adopted by. The dogs hunt to kill and the chapters let you hear them think about it.

If your reader takes that in their stride they will love these, and they'll have plenty to go at. If they don't, this is not the animal series for them and no amount of talking cats will soften it.

The other thing is that it really is book five. Four books of history sit underneath every conversation in it, and starting here would waste most of them.

What to read next

Into the Wild is where it begins, with a house cat called Rusty who keeps dreaming about the forest beyond his garden fence, and one evening walks into it.