I can't believe I finally made it. After 10+ years of catching up to current Warriors releases, I finally get to experience an arc while it's actually happening, and not a few years after the fact. So this is somewhat new territory for me as all other arcs at least in some way had been spoiled for me, intentionally or not. The community doesn't exactly excel at marking their spoilers and even when they do there's a lot of sites that have horrid muted word filtering systems. Ah well. Let's dive in. Spoilers ahead, as always.
It has been some time since the Lights in the Mist returned from the Dark Forest. All is well in the Clans, and the changes that are to be made to the warrior code are being discussed among them all. We follow three young cats. Sunbeam, a cat with relationship troubles; Flamepaw, one of Firestar's descendants who feels a huge pressure to live up to his great-grandfather; and Frostpaw, a nervous newly-selected medicine cat apprentice of RiverClan. Big changes seem to be coming to the Clans, both good and bad. Especially once RiverClan is left completely leaderless.
My main thoughts on this book are: overall underwhelming, but I do like it. It's good. Fine. But it doesn't really excel at anything so far.
I like our new protagonists, especially Flamepaw (Nightheart) and Sunbeam. Frostpaw felt a little bit too much like Alderheart in A Vision of Shadows to me, a nervous medicine cat apprentice. I do like her, but she's just not really my cup of tea and doesn't stand out so far. Sunbeam I like a lot because we really delve into her relationships to the cats around her, particularly her family and friends. She struggles between staying loyal to them or being true to her Clan and telling Tigerstar the truth about them. Flamepaw's conflict felt...honestly a bit out of place would hold a lot more weight to see him struggling under Firestar's legacy if he was one of the only cats in ThunderClan to be related to him. But there's so many; practically a third if not more of ThunderClan is in some way related to Firestar by now. So while I like Flamepaw as a character (he's kind of a brat, it's great), his conflict just feels a bit forced and like it ignores the fact that so many cats in ThunderClan could be facing the same struggle.
Now for the plot: there so far isn't really any? There's a sign of things to come with yet more unrest in the Clans because of RiverClan acting strange and the changes to the warrior code, but so far nothing concrete has been established. Also, despite Frostpaw being the least interesting of the main characters, I did find her chapters to be the most engaging since something is happening here we've never seen before: RiverClan loses both its leader, its deputy and its future to-be leader in the span of a few days. There's probably something going on with the green-eyed cat Frostpaw met, supposedly from StarClan. I do look forward to seeing what happens next!
Honestly aside from the overall lack of a plot and Flamepaw's main conflict feeling kind of eh, my biggest gripe with the book is the huge exposition dumps. Entire pages are dedicated just to narrating events that happened in books prior. And I get that this might be necessary in some cases; there's countless Warriors books preceding this one, after all. But there's just too many of them and they go on for ages. It'd be better to keep them sparse and condense the information to only what is absolutely needed, because it really took me out of the book when the author went on another summarizing-spree about what happened earlier.
Overall a pretty good start to an arc, but not particularly noteworthy or strong, outside of the whole RiverClan-lacks-a-leader thing.
Rating: 3.5/5
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