My thoughts on The Elder's Quest: Leafstar

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MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ELDER'S QUEST ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Eventful. If there is one word that perfectly encapsulates book one of Changing Skies, this has to be it. In previous arcs the first book is mostly just used to set up characters and their personalities. In The Elder's Quest however, it was quite different. I would attribute this to the fact that we already know about 2/3 of these characters. They don't need as much of a setup as Moonpaw, therefore we can get right into the action. Starting with Leafstar, she is old. Not even that far into the book, SkyClan is trying to depose of her as leader, due to her age, as well as rather poor judgement in a badger hunt gone wrong. The vote ultimately ends up in Leafstar's favor, and she is allowed to remain as leader for now. Not too long after, she heads out to prove herself by catching prey for the hungry clan which was suffering from twolegs poisoning the prey. This went very wrong, as Leafstar ends up getting seriously injured, which gave the clan another reason to remove her. She ultimately decides to step down at a gathering, leaving the rest of the clans stunned. My thoughts: I kind of called it in my guess that there would be a change in leadership, but already? Now that was unexpected. It is certainly interesting to see Leafstar struggling with age and her stubbornness. Nice change of pace from every other arc which contains all younger cats. IIRC the only other book where the protagonist was an old cat was Graystripe's Vow. Her stubbornness was quite infuriating, and I think everyone reading could tell that the badger hunt wouldn't end well. IMO this wasn't the most enjoyable POV, (I didn't love that basically every chapter was just "oh Leafstar old") I think the Tawnypelt POV was the much better of the two old cat POVs. Final Thoughts on Leafstar I am very interested to see where this arc goes with Leafstar, and what they will do with her now. 1 book in and she already stepped down? Unless something changes in book 2, Hawkwing will be receiving his nine lives (unless StarClan wants to keep Leafstar as leader?) Just to be clear, I might have some criticisms of this POV, but I still thought it was good. Still an enjoyable read and a very interesting story, but not my favorite of the three POVs in terms of book one. (The other two are far better IMO.)