Of all Warriors books I’ve read, A Warrior’s Spirit was one of the most uninspired ones. This is the prime example of the principle of quantity over quality that is dominating the series. It still got 2.5 stars in total, mainly because of Mothwing’s Secret and my nostalgia for the first two arcs. 

Pebbleshine’s Kits: ★★ 

This novella takes place during Hawkwing’s Journey and is kinda the backstory for A Vision of Shadows. I neither like this part of the sixth arc nor do I like to read about pregnant characters – and that includes cats. Even worse are the POV birthing scenes. Compared to Dawn of the Clans, there are luckily less birth scenes in the newer arcs, but I’m still not a fan of them. 

This story also had many storylines we’ve seen before. We have non-Clan cats and Clan-cats meeting and being irritated by each other’s lifestyle, clumsy descriptions of human objects that you don’t know what they even are, and some random animals attacking the cats. Pebbleshine is your typical Warriors character with no interesting traits whatsoever. Generally, the writing style was not great so that I couldn’t really get into the story. 

The best thing about this novella was meeting some faces we know already. We meet Micah and Tree as well, though I find the meeting with Tree a bit weird considering the fact that Tree later dates Violetshine who’s the kit of Pebbleshine who he meets while she’s pregnant with her.  

Tree’s Roots: ★★ 

This story had the potential to be interesting since the Sisters are such an interesting group of cats which I would love to get to know more about, but sadly it wasn’t. Out of the three, Tree’s Roots was the most uninspired story – uninspired insofar that it was nothing new for the series (two(!) fox attacks and a dog attack) and very predictable. When meeting specific characters, it was clear from the beginning that they would die. It seems that the death of characters is the only way this novella tries to evoke emotions from the reader. 

Getting to know more about the Sisters was interesting but we barely spent any time with them since it’s the fate of male cats to be abandoned from the group which is kinda cruel honestly. Talking about cruelty, why is Moon again a toxic mother figure? We have so many of them in the series. Otherwise, the plot intersects with the one of Pebbleshine’s Kits which is just unnecessary. 

Mothwing’s Secret: ★★★.5 

This was my favorite novella in this collection. Mothwing is by far the most interesting character of those three and the only cat that I truly care for. It also seems that more care was put into this story, since the plot of the Sasha manga is mentioned. My love of Mothwing has grown in the last time, and I just wanted to hug her most of the time because she deserves better. Compared to other entries in the series, her doubt because of StarClan is depicted quite well. In general, I liked the depiction of her emotions. 

As much as Mothwing is in the focus, her brother Hawkfrost is as well and it’s nice that he gets some more character development. Of course, the fact that he faked the sign for Mothwing to become the medicine cat is already mentioned in other books, but it’s still interesting to see from Mothwing’s POV. Hawkfrost’s behaviour was wrong but one the other side, Mothwing wanted to become a medicine cat so badly.