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More Feline Fantasy for Halloween

by Kelly on October 23rd, 2007

I’ve said before that fantasy is not my thing. I am, however, willing to give almost anything a try. So, I dutifully dug into Warriors’ Firestar’s Quest, having already been disappointed by The Sight, which was the first book of one of the Warriors’ arcs. Again, despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t get into it. And clearly, I am in the minority. The book is one of the national bestselling Warriors’ series and a number of kids do love it.

Firestar’s Quest is called “the greatest adventure ever for ThunderClan’s heros.” Firestar is, in fact, the leader of ThunderClan. You know this by skimming the six (yes, six) pages of character listings and allegiances in the beginning of the book - literally a laundry list of who’s who - and an additional four pages of maps. As with The Sight, I found this off-putting; I don’t like books that require flow charts.

I like to enjoy my reading, not flip back from page to page trying to remember who’s who and which cat is with which clan (there are ten different clans in the book, almost each with a leader, deputy and medicine cat). For a book billed for ages 9-12 (and perhaps a little older), this seems terribly complicated. Of course, you can always buy the separate Field Guide to sort it all out, I guess (marketing geniuses!).

As with The Sight, there are lots of background pages setting up story lines that don’t go anywhere. Considering the books are written as sets of series, this is not surprising. It is, however, annoying. I get the feeling that this book was written simply in order to sell another book: “Erin” (who is really more than one person, see below) keeps churning clan after clan book out. The two books that follow this one in the series are, I’m told, scheduled to be released the day after Christmas 2007.

Whew. Okay, now that I’m through most of my complaints, I’ll get to the storyline. The premise of this book is that there is finally peace between the warrior Clans after a number of prior boundary disputes. Firestar (leader of the ThunderClan) is proud of his clan and the peace that exists. However, he is plagued at night by disturbing dreams about cats in distress and this causes him concern. Through a sequence of events, he finds out that he has been lied to by another clan and sets off to make things right.

It does have lots of action and suspense - the battle scenes would be intriguing to some kids for sure. Notwithstanding the action bits, the book is incredibly long, weighing in at more than 500 pages, and it feels long. In no way would I want to discourage reading, but I could see how the length and the number of characters might frustrate some readers. I didn’t find it compelling enough to stick with it all the way through - it took me several spurts of reading to get through the book. It was, in other words, extremely easy to put down.

The book does have some good morals - the importance of honesty and following your destiny, for example. In that way, it’s a “feel good” book. But that’s about the only positive thing I could take from it (sorry, guys).

At $17.99, it’s a hefty price to pay for a book that necessarily requires the sequels - and unlike Harry Potter, these sequels are churned out several times per year. If your kid is dying to have it, I’d check with the local library first.

You can visit the web site (caution, the flash intro to the site has some graphics that could be frightening to very young children) to find out more information about the series, the characters and the authors. That’s right, authors plural. Despite the single author’s name “Erin Hunter” on the book, the series is actually penned by a group of three children’s authors, Victoria Holmes, Kate Cary and Cherith Baldry. Apparently, this round robin style of writing is what contributes to a number of consistency errors within the books.

You can also sign up on the site to win a signed set of the book (hurry, though, the deadline is October 25).

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POSTED IN: By Genre, Fantasy and Sci-Fi, tweens