By Erin Hunter
From the Warriors team, with dogs in place of cats. After an earthquake empties a city of its people, a lone stray named Lucky has to survive it on his own.
Lucky is a Lone Dog and proud of it. Then the Big Growl hits — an earthquake that cracks open the Trap House where he's locked in a cage. The walls give way and he gets out. Most of the dogs caged near him don't. The city he lands in has no people left in it, just fire, hissing gas, and food gone bad. Lucky can handle that; he always has. But then he finds his littersister Bella, who's leading a pack of house dogs that have never hunted, never drunk from a river, never once had to fight for a scrap. They need him, and they need him badly. Needing someone back is the one thing Lucky has spent his whole life refusing to do.
If your child has read Warriors, this is going to feel like coming home. It's the same writing team running the same machine on purpose: short chapters, cliffhangers, a hum of prophecy under everything, a whole invented animal vocabulary to pick up. Longpaws are humans, loudcages are cars, the Sky-Dogs are overhead. Your child already knows how to read a book built this way. What's new is dogs in place of cats, and because dogs have always lived alongside people, Lucky's world is haunted by human leftovers the forest cats never had — empty houses, abandoned cages, a collar with no one in it. If your child just finished the last Warriors arc and can't stand for it to be over, this is about as close as the shelf gets to just carrying on. Six more books and a few specials are waiting behind it.