A review by cassidylynnereads
River of Fire by Erin Hunter

3.0

I don’t know why, but I’ve found myself in the middle of a major Warriors kick right now. I could not wait to get this book from the moment it was released and just wanted my previous read to be finished so that I could get to this one. Despite my anticipation, this book was average. Definitely good by earlier Warriors book standards, but not nearly as exciting as Darkest Night. I feel like the authors rushed into publishing Tigerheart’s Shadow and as a result there wasn’t much to explore in this book. It was really just a lot of waiting around for Tigerstar to return and rebuild ShadowClan as he did by the end of his Super Edition. The conflicts were mostly the same for the first three-quarters of the book: will Tree find a place amongst the Clans? How will the prophecy be fulfilled with only three Clans left? Will ShadowClan and SkyClan ever get along? Where does Twigpaw truly belong? Of course all of these problems were resolved by the end, but the first few chapters just seemed to reiterate them to the point where they didn’t even seem like pressing issues anymore, just things I wanted to resolve already. The book really picked up in the end as this one met up with where Tigerheart’s Shadow left off, but I don’t think it should take until the end of a book for things to start happening. Also there was a certain romance introduced in this book that felt extremely forced, unnecessary, and artificial

Spoiler

I’m talking about Alderheart’s crush on Velvet. I don’t even know why she and Fuzzball were brought into ThunderClan other than to give Alderheart an excuse to see Rippletail in the Twolegplace, which isn’t a good enough reason to introduce a whole romance. This just seemed like a shallow Spottedleaf and Firepaw all over again, where his main attraction seems to stem from how “beautiful” Velvet is and how good she smells (which is a weird descriptor in the first place). Alderheart and Needletail was a much better hinted at romance, whereas this one was completely forced and rushed into the book to give Alderheart a reason to go to Twolegplace. I just didn’t like it and wish it was left out

I imagine the next book will probably be better since there’s no need to drag the plot on as we wait to catch up with a Super Edition that should have been published after this one rather than before. Like I said, this one was just average. It wasn’t terrible, but it definitely wasn’t up to the caliber of Darkest Night which came just before it.