Book Review: The Quest Begins by Erin Hunter (Seekers #1)

 

Despite my years of reading both Warriors and Survivors, Seekers never actually particularly peaked my interest. Possibly because it's about bears and those are just not one of my favorite animals. But now that I've gotten the first book for cheap, I'll give it a look. Full disclosure: this is by no means a guarantee that I'll cover the rest of the series. I just wanted to give the first book a look. Spoilers ahead.

We meet three bear cubs across North America: Kallik, a polar bear looking for her brother; Toklo, a grizzly rejected by his mother; and Lusa, a black bear from a zoo who longs for adventure. The three all seem to be fated to meet and go on their own personal journey in The Quest Begins.

Part of me likes this book. Part of me does not. The writing definitely is pretty strong and I like some of the characters (Lusa and Kallik). Toklo I'm completely neutral on, he was just rather boring to me. The other characters are all rather one note, sans maybe Oka, Toklo's mother. 

My biggest gripe with this book is that there is no plot or goal. It's just three bears doing stuff completely separate from one another. It literally ends with Lusa meeting Toklo, but aside from that nothing seems to connect these three random bears. Heck, the title even makes no sense. "The Quest Begins". What quest? There is no quest here to speak of other than maybe Lusa's brief journey to meet up with Toklo, which was literally solved in a few chapter cycles. 

The story is also rather down-to-earth at first, but then completely catches the reader off-guard by introducing a shape-shifting bear. So far, the only possibly supernatural things the story covered was the bear religions (with each species having different beliefes respectively). But now we randomly come across a bear cub that can assume any shape. That's weird, even by Warriors standards. It just gave me real whiplash because this mostly-grounded story suddenly went full-blown fantasy in a fingersnap.

Overall, I did like this book, but it's not perfect. I may or may not check out the rest. I haven't really been swayed either way.

Rating: 4/5