Your reader finished the Warriors books and wants more cats, wolves, dragons or owls with clans, codes and a territory to defend. Ten series that scratch the same itch, ordered by age and by how much they hurt — because with animal stories that is the question that actually matters.
Updated September 2026 · 10 books · With content notes
Erin Hunter's Warriors is not really a series about cats. It is a series about belonging to a group with rules, being tested by it, and sometimes being failed by it — told at a pace that keeps an eight-year-old turning pages and with a body count that surprises the adult who bought it.
That combination is rarer than it looks. Plenty of animal books are cosy, and plenty of fantasy is epic, but very few give a young reader a whole society with its own law, its own religion and its own politics, and then let real consequences land. That is why a reader who finishes Warriors so often bounces off whatever comes next.
The ten below all have it: a group, a code, a territory, and stakes that are allowed to be real. They are ordered from the gentlest entry point to the one that is genuinely a book for adults — and every entry says plainly how sad it gets, because a nine-year-old ambushed by a death they were not ready for is how a reader stops reading.
From the gentlest entry point to the deep end.
Katherine Applegate
A silverback gorilla who has spent twenty-seven years in a shopping-mall cage, narrating in short, plain lines that land like poetry. The gentlest book here by a distance, and the one most likely to be finished in an afternoon. Based on a real gorilla, which makes the ending hit harder than it has any right to.
Content notes: captivity, animal neglect, the death of an animal companion.
+ Add to my librarySara Pennypacker
A boy and the fox he raised are separated by a war, and the book follows both of them walking back towards each other. The prose is beautiful and the emotional damage is precise. This is the one to hand a reader who wants animals but is not ready for a battle every chapter.
Content notes: war, landmines, injury to an animal, separation.
+ Add to my libraryErin Hunter
The book that started it. A house cat walks into the forest, finds four clans living by a warrior code, and stays. Everything that makes the series work is already here: the politics, the naming ceremonies, the sense that the forest has a history older than any cat in it.
Content notes: fighting between animals, named characters die, illness.
+ Add to my libraryErin Hunter
Erin Hunter again, this time dogs. A pack forms after an earthquake destroys the city, and has to invent its own rules from nothing. Slightly older in feel than Warriors and more brutal about hierarchy, but the same engine: a stranger learning a code from the inside.
Content notes: natural disaster, violent hierarchy, named characters die.
+ Add to my libraryTui T. Sutherland
Wings of Fire, book one. Five dragonets raised underground and told they will end a war they never chose. The most plot-driven series on this list and the easiest sell to a reader who finished Warriors and wants the same thing but bigger. Currently the natural successor in most school libraries.
Content notes: war, imprisonment, violence between dragons, character death.
+ Add to my libraryKathryn Lasky
Guardians of Ga'Hoole, book one. Owls, and an owl fascism. A young barn owl is kidnapped by an academy that grinds the will out of its recruits, and escapes to find a legendary order of guardians. Darker and stranger than its cover suggests, with the most fully built world here after Warriors.
Content notes: kidnapping, indoctrination, cruelty to chicks, character death.
+ Add to my libraryKenneth Oppel
A young bat separated from his colony during migration, hunted by owls, crossing a continent he has never seen. Oppel writes flight better than almost anyone, and the sense of a small creature in an enormous hostile sky is the whole point.
Content notes: predation, injury, separation from family, sustained peril.
+ Add to my libraryBrian Jacques
The oldest lineage on this list. Mice, badgers and hares defending an abbey against rats and stoats, with feasts described in such loving detail that readers remember the food before the fighting. Episodic, comforting, and enormous — twenty-two books.
Content notes: battle violence, slavery, character death.
+ Add to my libraryDavid Clement-Davies
Wolves in medieval Transylvania, with a family gift for seeing the future. Clement-Davies writes the most grown-up prose here, and the violence is not stylised. The step up for a reader who has outgrown Warriors but is not done with animals.
Content notes: graphic violence, torture, disturbing imagery, character death.
+ Add to my libraryRichard Adams
A group of rabbits leaves a doomed warren and crosses the English countryside to found a new one. Adults keep calling it a children's book and it is not: it is a novel about founding a society, with its own language and mythology. Read it when the reader is ready, not before.
Content notes: graphic violence, warren destruction, authoritarianism, character death.
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Guardians of Ga'Hoole. A whole society with its own law, its own history and its own villains — the closest thing here to the feeling of the first Warriors arc.
Wings of Fire. Faster, louder, dragons instead of cats, and long enough to keep them busy for a year.
The One and Only Ivan, then Pax. Both are about animals and both are gentle, and neither asks anyone to survive a battle.
The Sight, then Watership Down. Real prose, real violence, and the point at which animal stories stop being a children's genre.
Redwall. Twenty-two books of abbey feasts and comic villains, and no arc so long that missing one matters.
Silverwing for the flying, then ways out of a reading slump if nothing is landing.
Warriors alone is over eighty books across seven arcs, plus super editions, novellas and field guides — and they are not published in reading order. Redwall is twenty-two. Wings of Fire is past fifteen. A reader who gets into this shelf is not tracking one series, they are tracking four at once, each with its own numbering and its own gaps.
That is the actual reason these households end up with three copies of the same book and a child who cannot remember whether they read the fifth one. Writing down what has been finished, in one place, is not bookkeeping for its own sake — it is what lets a nine-year-old walk into a library and know exactly which spine to look for.
Wings of Fire if you want the same pace with bigger stakes, Guardians of Ga'Hoole if what you loved was the clans and the code, and Survivors if you simply want more Erin Hunter. Save Watership Down for later.
Most readers start between eight and eleven. The books are short and the vocabulary is easy, but named characters die from the first arc onwards, so the limiting factor is usually how a child handles loss, not reading level.
Redwall is the safest bet on this list: villains lose, feasts are enormous, and the deaths that do happen are mostly heroic and clearly signposted. The One and Only Ivan is gentle but it will still make you cry.
It is shelved as one and it should not be. The violence is graphic, the politics are genuinely dark, and it is a better book read at thirteen than at eight. There is no rush.
By arc: The Prophecies Begin, The New Prophecy, Power of Three, Omen of the Stars, and so on. The super editions and novellas slot between arcs and are optional, which is exactly why a list of what has been read helps so much.
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