Read Warriors (The Broken Code) 6 – A Light in the Mist free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Erin Hunter's A Light in the Mist is a wild-cat fantasy for 10 year olds, and it drops you deep into the middle of a very dark run of books.
The opening is set in the Dark Forest, which is where cats go when they're too cruel for the starry place the rest of them reach.
A young SkyClan warrior called Rootspring is pinned in a clearing with a mob of dead cats circling him, screaming at another cat to finish him off.
They're screaming because Ashfur is making them. He's been dead a long time and he is still furious about it, and he has worked out how to control the spirits of cats who never wanted any part of this.
What he did before the book starts is worse. He cut the living clans off from their ancestors, and then he took over a leader's body and wore it.
It's a strong opening and it does not ease you in.
The best bit is the knot Rootspring finds himself in. The cat attacking him, Snowtuft, is being forced to, and keeps apologising with his eyes between swipes. Rootspring could win by killing him. But a cat who dies here is gone completely, not just dead but finished, and Rootspring can't do it to someone who helped him.
That's a properly grown-up problem to hand a young reader, and the book takes it seriously.
The clan language does a lot of the work as well. Cats are mouse-hearts and fox-hearts and mouse-brains. They share tongues. Once your reader has the vocabulary they tend to use it at the dinner table for months.
Two things to say plainly. This is violent. The first few pages have cats yowling "Slit his throat", claws going into a throat, blood on fur, and characters who were friends in earlier books cheering for a death. It's animal violence rather than human, and it's not gratuitous, but it is constant.
And it is nowhere near the start. The catalogue doesn't number this one, but the story assumes you already know who Bramblestar and Squirrelflight are, what the impostor did to the clans, and which characters died doing something about it. Handed to a newcomer, it's a wall of names.
Send them to the beginning instead. Into the Wild does the job properly. A house cat called Rusty goes into the woods, finds four clans of wild cats living by a code he's never heard of, and has to decide whether he wants that life.
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