Review: Beautifully written - a must read!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2013
With the Remembrance Ceremony due to start at any time, Shanna was annoyed at her brother Kaidan for not being there on time. The Ceremony was an annual tradition which was vitally important, and to miss it would incur the displeasure of the Masters. But with seconds to spare, Kaidan arrived, dishevelled and red-faced – the reason he would tell Shanna later. Living on Frontier for the past three hundred years, Shanna’s ancestors had crash landed on the planet. The survivors had built a safe and secure environment, one which saw Shanna and her family living in peace and harmony with the rest of Frontier’s inhabitants.Living on their farm on the outskirts of Watchtower, Shanna, Kaidan, mum Janna and dad Adlan bred and trained starcats for the rest of the community. Starcats had evolved over the years and were now intelligent panther-like cats, companions to almost everyone. Their shining tidemarks set them apart from anything else and their ability to know what their owners required was uncanny. Shanna, at just fifteen years of age, was encouraged to choose her life’s work on the planet; she would also be able to pick a starcat for her very own.Joining the Scout Corps found Shanna the youngest in her group, also the only one who brought along two starcats. Brothers Storm and Twister had both chosen her, so training the cubs was double the fun, headaches, lack of sleep and devotion that came with them! As first year cadets of the Scout Corps their training was intense. With Shanna being so knowledgeable, she was chosen to train her group about the starcats and their abilities – this created problems, especially from another cadet, Taya, who was jealous and angry about being told what to do by someone younger than she was.Suddenly, while on a training patrol with their senior Scouts, a discovery was made. They had to go further than cadets this new had ever been – they had heard of Below, the terrible dangers of this uncharted part of their planet, knew they would go there eventually, but that day the lives of the colonists on Frontier were set to change. The invasion of a race of aliens called Garsal had begun – if they weren’t stopped their lives would never be the same again. What would happen to young Shanna, her starcats and the rest of her Scout group? Would they survive the horrors of the invasion?I absolutely loved this book! I loved the starcats, particularly Storm and Twister; the detail woven through the story by the author made it so that I could visualise them, their traits and abilities. Shanna was a wonderful character and her slow emergence as an accepted member of her group, one who gained the respect not just of her fellow cadets but of the Senior Scouts as well was heartwarming. I was sad when I reached the ending; but gratified to learn the sequel isn’t too many months away! Leonie Rogers is another Aussie author I have no hesitation in recommending highly.