Warriors Box Set: Volumes 1 to 3

Warriors Box Set: Volumes 1 to 3By Erin Hunter

Humans can take their Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine. The Warriors series blows doors on them because the heroes are cats! My human brought home the first book, figuring it would be good for me to review… then she brought home the second… and the third. Now we’re on the fourth and fifth books. It turns out that the first three books have been put together as set, so I’ll get into reviewing them now.

The main cat in these books is Rusty, a ginger cat who has all the comforts of home — cat food served to him every day, a nice warm house to live in, a cozy bed… but a vague dissatisfaction with his life shows up in his dreams, where he is free to live in the wild. His vision comes true one day when he encounters some ferals not far from his home. When he bravely defends himself, they open up to him. It turns out that they belong to a community of wild cats who live under a code of honor. Rusty begs to join them and they reluctantly agree. Thus Rusty begins his new life as Firepaw, an apprentice in the ThunderClan, which lives uneasily alongside three other clans of feral cats: RiverClan, WindClan and ShadowClan. In the first three books, we follow Firepaw through his apprenticeship and adventures as ThunderClan battles to keep its turf and deal with its own internal intrigues.

While they don’t get quite everything correct (the series is human-written, after all), the Warriors series pays incredible attention to detail and cat behavior. And they capture each cat’s personality, down to the flick of a whisker. Each chapter is so engrossing that you are compelled to keep going to find out what happens next. The only downside to these books? My human has taken to calling me “kittypet” — the insult to end all insults! She’s lucky I don’t form a clan of my own and revolt.