"Ember Falls" by S. D. Smith

I'm going to have to get the third book of this out of the library, because as the back cover said, Ember Falls is basically the Empire Strikes Back of The Green Ember. As such, it ended on a cliffhanger. (Note: For those who don't know. this series is about talking rabbits, who are having a war with talking wolves and birds of prey. They all have medieval weapons.)

I spent much of the "war" sequences yelling at the rabbits for doing the honorable thing, attacking their enemies (literal wolves) in pitched battles, and then dying in droves because, again, they're rabbits (with swords) fighting wolves (with bigger swords). And they have exploding catapult ammunition, which... if you're smart enough to make A) exploding shells and B) big heavy metal things, you can make these weird things known as "cannons". And "blunderbusses". And "land mines".

 

And even if you don't build gunpowder weapons, you can still use stealth tactics better than you do. Rabbits are good at hiding, but I don't even once see them using the novel technique of "ambushes". Or any guerrilla tactics at all, really. You have enough chemistry to make healing elixirs, you have enough chemistry to make birdlime and spread it on random perches the enemy birds will land on. You have enough digging power to carve out citadels inside mountains, you have enough digging power to make Punji pits. (Okay, I get that those are forbidden by the Geneva convention, but the principle stands.)

Basically, I was mad at the rabbits for not cheating enough. According to Shy Guy (a relative), it's because "they're the good guys" (not an exact quote); however, that shouldn't prevent them from employing any of the many inventive ways medieval people came up with to kill their enemies.

Anyway! Picket is more mature in this book than he was in the last one, for which I am thankful. Heather got less optimistic, though. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard E10+ for fantasy violence. It could be a decent videogame, although I feel like it would turn out as an RTS and a visual novel rolled into one.

4 stars. It was good, despite the rabbits' bad tactics.

(Endnote: Yes, I do understand that narratively, most of the things I'm suggesting are a path to the Dark Side a "we've become just as bad as the enemy" moment. However, from a purely military standpoint, they make sense.)