(DISCLAIMER: My reviews of Warriors books prior to Eclipse may be slightly fuzzy, as I did not have an account for the beginning of my big series reread. Major credit to Sunnyfall on YouTube for her Trip Through Time series, which helped me to gather my thoughts without a re-reread. If you really want a deep dive, go watch her stuff. She brings up a lot of the same points more eloquently.)

I really want to try not to be too mean to this book, but it kind of single-handedly caused a reading slump, so take from that what you will. The beginning was fun enough; usual Clan slice-of-life stuff. It delivers the iconic Berrystumpytail joke, and Hollypaw has a moment that brings up an aroace reading of her character. However, once they begin traveling, the book starts to drag a bit. I know traveling books being dry is a bit of an old concept in the fandom, but I can understand why.

What I really find distasteful about this book is the way it portrays the Tribe of Rushing Water.

They face adversity from an invading group of outsiders who seek to use their land for their own gain, catching all the prey they desire. As the Tribe does not set territory borders, and they are not trained in battle, the intruders end up walking all over them before the Clan cats step in to help. I find this particularly infuriating because I actually think the Clans could benefit from learning from the Tribe's disdain for borders. So many disputes, both in the old territories and the new one by the lake, could be solved if they thought outside of the box a bit on their rigid borders. But no, the way of the Clans is portrayed as unquestionably superior, and the Tribe must conform to survive.

This did not need to happen to forward the plot. This arc is already a bit confused about where it's going so far, with the major thread being the prophecy with the Three. The one thing gained is an understanding of Lionpaw's powers, but we get that in the next entry anyway. This book also omits a major point of that thread, Jaypaw telling his siblings about the prophecy, and it is skipped over at the start of the next. I would've been fine with missing some of the Tribe stuff to get that plot beat "on screen", so to speak. All Three feel a pull towards the mountains in the beginning, and Jaypaw ends up meeting with the Tribe's ancestors, so it can be argued that they needed to travel here. But they could've had a fun little mountain getaway without needing to drag the Tribe through the mud in the process.

I do like the descriptions of the mountains themselves. I think Warriors excels at environmental description most of the time, and this book has a good showing of it. I don't think it's a total loss; there's a baseline for this series for me that's hard to dip under unless it's truly deplorable, and while this book did a lot that's worth criticism, Warriors books are usually fun popcorn reads for me at worst. 2 stars for me is "frustrating", and 3 stars is "good" if that helps to illustrate my placement.