A brand new Erin Hunter series! I've been anticipating this big-time. It's a well-known fact at this point that I quite enjoy some of the Hunter sister-series like Bamboo Kingdom and Bravelands. So will this first installment stick the landing? Let's find out. Spoilers ahead.
Cat sisters Luna and Willow grow up alone on the streets. One day they come across a hidden community of magical animals, the attuned, who seek for Luna to join them when it turns out that she has fire powers. This causes a rift to form between the two sisters, with both Luna and Willow wanting something different out of life.
Yeah, they did it. I really enjoyed this one. How the rest of the series will go, I can't predict, but for a first installment this was really solid. I was hooked quite quickly until the very end. I finished the entire book in the span of a few hours, barely putting it down.
I love the world-building, from the different covens of magical animals to the portrayal of familiars in this universe to seeing how the humans are involved in all this. This definitely feels like a neat, expansive world with lots of room for creative storytelling. The concepts are very cool and distinct and I like how this is a story told from the magical animals POV's, and not the human witches (the latter of which I feel a lot of children's and YA books tend to do).
The characters were also quite neat. There's a lot of side characters, but most of them left a reasonably big impression on me. They didn't feel like bland blank slates like a lot of Warriors side characters do these days. The highlight here, though, is definitely the sisters, Luna and Willow. They're our main protagonists and they each feel truly distinct and like their own character. They have a lot of conflict throughout this story, but it all feels believable and both of their actions all are well-motivated in each of their POVs. Luna is the bolder of the two sisters, whereas Willow is more shy and withdrawn. Luna ends up joining the anti-familiar animal coven called the Renegades, Willow meanwhile finds herself drawn to a human girl named Violet and almost is bound to her. Their character-writing is just super neat.
If I do have to bring up a criticism, though, it's that the writing on the human side of things doesn't feel as fleshed out as the rest. At least, not yet. This might of course still be explored in future installments. But I do think that, for it taking up a large part of the last third of book one, I did need to have a bit more substance in this installment. The human villains feel very bland and one-dimensional.
But my biggest issue is probably Violet. She's a very major player in the story, being a major deuteragonist once she's introduced as Willow's possible witch. Yet she's just...very bland as a character. Unlike the sisters, who each feel defined and like three-dimensional characters, Violet is just kinda your bland kid character. She doesn't really have a clear personality (outside of the generic "nice") or traits or flaws or really anything to set her apart from other characters of this type.
And if she were a minor character, this would be forgivable. But she is a huge part of the story, especially in the last third, she basically becomes Willow's main motivation for doing what she does once the duo befriend each other. Yet Violet still feels bland and forgettable, and because we barley explore her character, her friendship with Willow also doesn't feel very realistic or tangible. We're told these characters have grown close over the time skip, but we're never shown. So the human stuff, but especially Violet, could've been more developed.
But aside from that, this is quite a banger opener for the series. I look forward to the rest.
Rating: 4/5
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