By Erin Hunter
The team behind Warriors moves to the African savanna, where every animal keeps a single law: kill only to survive. A young lion watches that law shatter the day his father is murdered in front of him.
Everything in Bravelands runs on the Code: kill only to survive. Lions, elephants, baboons, even the vultures keep it, and that shared bargain is how so many animals manage to live on one plain. Swiftcub worships his father, and the day Gallant gives him his grown-up name, Fearless, is also the day a lion called Titan arrives to seize the pride. Gallant beats him in a fair fight. Titan kills him anyway, right in front of his son, then sends his followers to hunt down Gallant's remaining cubs. Fearless escapes. Almost nothing else does. Elsewhere, a young baboon named Thorn is fighting to win the rank that would let him marry, and a little elephant named Sky keeps glimpsing something awful just before it happens. Then the Great Mother — the ancient elephant every animal trusts to settle their disputes — is found dead in the waterhole. A lion, a baboon, and an elephant who would never ordinarily cross paths turn out to be the only ones who can work out what's really going on.
A Warriors reader has spent years inside a system: the warrior code, the ranks, the ceremonies, all the rules somebody's always breaking. Bravelands hands them a brand-new code on page one and smashes it by page thirty, which is exactly the machinery they already love. It's the same house, too: Erin Hunter, three points of view, short chapters, a prophecy humming underneath. What's different is the ground it all stands on. These are real African animals doing real African-animal things, right down to a lion taking a pride and killing the previous cubs, because that is what actually happens out there. The story and the nature documentary keep snapping into the same shape, and a child who loves both animals and adventure gets fed by both at once.