Erin Hunter’s Oathkeeper is a Bravelands story for 10 year olds, and it opens with a lion cub in an eagle’s talons.<\/p>\n
That’s the prologue, set years before everything else. A hungry crowned eagle is hunting for her chicks, spots a cub stumbling across the open plain and drops on it. She carries it back to the nest. Then the cub wakes up, and a baboon’s face comes through the leaves.<\/p>\n
That cub is Fearless. By chapter one he’s grown, he has a pride of his own, and he’s standing in a burnt forest facing the lion who killed his father.<\/p>\n
Titan has wolves now. Golden wolves who have eaten the hearts of the lions they killed and carry their spirits, which is why they move like lions. Titan also tells Fearless, almost in passing, what he did to the baboon who led all of Bravelands and had been Fearless’s friend since he was a cub.<\/p>\n
Then Titan’s daughter offers Fearless a choice. Come for her father, or save her brother, who two wolves are dragging away by the leg.<\/p>\n
This is a long way into the Bravelands story and it doesn’t stop to catch you up. Fearless has already lost a father, an adoptive father and his mother’s eyesight before this book begins, and that grief is doing most of the work in these scenes. A reader coming in cold will follow the fight without feeling why it hurts.<\/p>\n
What Erin Hunter does well here, as in the cat books, is the politics. The herd has a code. The animals argue about who it protects and what it’s worth. A good deal of the tension is who will risk what for whom rather than who can bite hardest.<\/p>\n
Be ready for the violence, though. It is not implied off the page. A cub is carried off to be fed to chicks in the prologue. Animals are killed and eaten for what their spirits will give. A father says of his own son that the pack may do as they please with him, and means it.<\/p>\n
Ten is about right for that. But a child who loved talking-animal stories at seven will find this a very different thing, and it’s worth reading the prologue yourself before deciding.<\/p>\n
If your reader would like the same sort of world from the beginning, Into the Wild is where the other one starts. Four clans of cats share a forest under a warrior code, an ordinary house cat wanders into it, and the very first scene is a territory fight on the rocks in moonlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Erin Hunter’s Oathkeeper is a Bravelands story for 10 year olds, and it opens with a lion cub in an eagle’s talons. That’s the prologue, set years before everything else. A hungry crowned eagle is hunting for her chicks, spots a cub stumbling across the open plain and drops on it. She carries it back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11426,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9676,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Into the Wild","lr_seo_hook":"A lion who swore to kill Titan, and a pride that must decide the cost."},"book_tag":[27],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[314],"class_list":["post-6994","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-fantasy-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-erin-hunter"],"yoast_title":"Bravelands – Oathkeeper by Erin Hunter | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A lion who swore to kill Titan, and a pride that must decide the cost. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n