A review by rinku
Wütender Sturm by Erin Hunter

adventurous emotional medium-paced

3.0

The Raging Storm is the final book of the sixth arc of Warriors, A Vision of Shadows. I originally was generous and gave 3.5 stars but now looking back on it, it is more a three-star read. The plot is not really great but so absurd at times that it’s funny again – Moonkitti’s videos on this arc capture its strange vibe perfectly. 

Liked it had to happen, there’s conflict between the Clans around the territory of SkyClan, especially between them and ShadowClan while RiverClan is still kinda isolated from the other clans. This whole conflict is so stupid because it could be solved easily when every Clan would give a piece of their land to SkyClan. This conflict escalates when

ShadowClan attacks SkyClan in the middle of the night, destroys their camp and tries to poison them

. Not one of the other Clans is trying to help SkyClan. The rest of the plot is sadly quite predictable and the finale weak and a cliché happy ending. 

Here it becomes clear as well what a bad leader Bramblestar is because he’s not interfering and not trying to solve the problem. Say what you want about Firestar, but he would’ve at least tried to solve the conflict. Tigerstar is such a bad leader too; not only does he accuse Jayfeather again for killing Flametail – a conflict that was solved over ten(!) books ago – but he also threatens to kill Alderheart if he’s not able to heal Puddleshine. Talking about the leaders, I also really dislike Leafstar and honestly modern SkyClan in general. 

The romance got annoying here, like it does always in the series. While I liked Finleap in the last book, he was just terrible here and the definition of a nice guy. He’s annoying with already expecting a marriage and children with Twigbranch, manipulative when telling her that he’ll leave her if she doesn’t want to have kits with him, and unnecessary so jealous. The romance between Violetshine and Tree was better, but not great as well. Violetshine’s only focussing on him and in the end,

she’s already expecting his kits, sigh. As if having kits is the only way love can manifest itself

. 

I can’t say too much about the characters that I haven’t before. Some character developments were believable, like Twigbranch realizing how unnecessary mean she’s to Flypaw. In comparison, Tigerstar’s character development for example was really unbelievable; he realizes that his behaviour was wrong way too fast, and it seems that the Erins want to solve the final conflict as quickly as possible. 

Now coming to my final thoughts on A Vision of Shadows: Especially the first half of this arc is one of the better ones in the Warriors series. You can feel a new spirit with Vicky leaving the direct writing team – for better or for worse – and see some plotlines that we haven’t seen before/that often. But this arc has the same problems as most of the arcs: While the first half of the arc is full of plot, the second part just drags. Like I mentioned above, the plot was absurdly funny at some points, not as supernatural as arc three and four and generally better than those. But compared to those arcs, the characters are much weaker. There were just too many cats to bound to any of them; there are some names in the allegiances that I haven’t read in the text once. I hope this cast will become more interesting in The Broken Code.