Book Review: Into the Wild

Summary: For generations, four Clans of wild cats have shared the forest according to the laws laid down by their ancestors. But the warrior code is threatened, and the ThunderClan cats are in grave danger. The sinister ShadowClan grows stronger every day. Noble warriors are dying—and some deaths are more mysterious than others.
In the midst of this turmoil appears an ordinary house cat named Rusty…who may turn out to be the bravest warrior of them all.

Thoughts: I've always enjoyed series about noble talking animals so I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to get around to reading this book...but it did (shrug). Well, I have read it and to be honest I wasn't all that impressed. Don't get me wrong, the writing style was great and though the book was full of cliches, they were done well enough that I wasn't writhing in agony (which is saying something because I can't stand an overdose of cliches), in truth, I had even come to like it by the end. The problem was that Erin Hunter obviously meant this to be for children and didn't really care much about a more mature audience. For the most part, this is the type of story younger readers would enjoy before they've seen this a thousand time over; the prophecy, the underdog nobody, turned hero, the evil superior in their midst...yeah, before they've had all that in almost every other fantasy book. Again, I did enjoy it by the end, it wasn't a bad story, but I'm not sure if I'll be picking up any more of this series any time soon.

Content: I admit being kinda surprised at the violence in here for such a typical kids book, in fact I enjoyed it a little more because of it. After all, you feel a little more for the characters when they might actually die. So, violence and death were probably the biggest problem. Aside from that, a clean read.