High three stars. And thus the Erin series decline begins again.
This book wasn’t bad, but it really felt to me like this series is starting to lose some of the tighter writing that book 1, especially, really had. The writing style feels a bit different here, though not inherently in a bad way. Survivors read a little different from Warriors and Seekers in the beginning, but I feel like I in this book it starts to return to that slightly more descriptive feeling rather than light and fast-paced. With that, unfortunately, apparently also comes the Warriors plot convenience and character sanding, arriving in full force with Lucky and the majority of the side characters. I’ll touch more on that in the character section later.
The plot in this book is pretty interesting the whole way through, with Lucky being exiled, traveling with Mickey briefly, finding the pups, and then working to convince Alpha to keep them for the rest of the book. But it’s not the most unfalsifiable of stories. The whole plotline of Lucky being kicked out of the pack briefly depends entirely on the other dogs, especially the Leashed Dogs having no empathy or spine for the one that THEY TRICKED into helping them. Then when he returns they will all magically be super regretful, and Lucky will forgive them because we can’t possibly have a main character hold a grudge. The Pack’s respond to the Fierce dog pups tends to be similarly dependent on what the plot needs. The pacing overall was alright, though, which was a nice change from Seekers and Warriors.
In terms of characters, I think this book does its best, but isn’t as strong as it could have been.
Lucky is fine. He’s never been that unique of a lead, but he got the job done. His background of being a Lone Dog made him more interesting, but unfortunately that goes out the window in this one. The shift from wanting to leave the Pack to suddenly not wanting to live without other dogs felt like a light-switch change in his entire identity. There was definitely a lot of effort put into making this change, but it didn’t feel gradual to me when last book he spent the whole time so excited to leave, and even before then he was still on the fence about staying even with the Leashed Dogs. His entire identity flipped from one extreme to the other too suddenly, in my opinion. While I like that he seemingly retains his smarts, most of that is just used when everyone else becomes useless for the plot. The most interesting part of Lucky this book was exploring his friendship with Mickey a little bit more, and also building a fatherly relationship with the pups.
Mickey got more development! Yay! Unfortunately, he was one of the only side characters to receive such treatment, and disappeared after Lucky and him returned to the pack. His slow acceptance that his humans were gone was sad, but I think well done overall.
The other Leashed Dogs who got some more focus were Sunshine, Daisy, and Martha. For what we saw of Sunshine and Daisy, I think they were well done. All we got were a few conversations or scenes each, but I think that was all we really needed. Daisy and Sunshine have more depth to them, and Daisy has grown. We only really needed one scene to understand that. Martha didn’t really have any personality before this, so her being motherly to the Fierce Dog pups was cute. But I would have liked to see more of it. Because she was such a blank slate beforehand, I don’t think one or two scenes was enough to characterize her strongly. I have hope the next books will help with this, though.
Alpha is either entirely competent to the point of invincibility or entirely useless, depending on what the plot demands, and Sweet has exactly 0 personality or relevance aside from vague love-interest vibes. They both were incredibly disappointing in this one.
Bella comes off as manipulative and toxic in how she treats her brother, which I really don’t like. Why are the two main female characters (so far, before Lick becomes more important), Bella and Sweet, both so underdeveloped? In Sweet’s case, she just doesn’t have much personality or really understandable motivations outside of basic ‘for the pack’ mentality. And Bella, though she has a personality, isn’t given the time to mature or really show that she’s learned anything. So it leads to her apologies all seeming fake, since we don’t really get anything to back them up. It really irks me that the most important female dogs in this book feel like they’re treated as stereotypes: ‘love interest’ and ‘plot convenience sister’ respectively.
Finally, villains. The Fierce Dogs are clearly meant to be intimidating, and I think they pretty well accomplish that. My only issue is that to make the Fierce dogs threatening, the book had to make the Wild Pack completely useless again for the sake of plot. Grunt is going to be a more interesting villain, I think, since there’s history between him and the Wild dogs. And I do appreciate that Blade is female. I may have said that in a previous review, but it’s worth mentioning again here. Erin stories so rarely have female villains, so it’s a nice change of pace.
Overall, while a bit disappointing, this wasn’t a bad book. I’m hopeful that the series will keep up this quality, at least, for a while. Onto book 4!
SERIES RATINGS:
The Empty City: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A Hidden Enemy: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Darkness Falls: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Broken Path: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Endless Lake: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Storm of Dogs: ⭐️⭐️⭐️