Bookworm Speaks!- The Burning Bridge
Bookworm Speaks!
The Burning Bridge: Ranger’s Apprentice Book 2
by John Flanagan
****
The Story: For years, the Kingdom of Araluen has prospered, with the evil Lord Morgarath safely behind the impassable mountains. But the scheming hand of the dark lord has not been idle…When Will and his friend Horace, an apprentice knight, travel to a neighboring village they discover an unsettling truth. Could it be that Morgarath has finally devised a plan to bring his legions over the mountains? If so, the King’s army is in imminent danger of being crushed. And Will and Horace are the only ones who can save them.
The Good: Once again…what makes this text shine is the characters. There are a lot of them in this book, some we are exploring in depth for the first time and they are all distinctive.
The text introduces a lot of characters but we don’t spend an excessive amount of time inside of their heads. Rather the author takes a much better approach and just puts them in a room together (both literally and figuratively) and just lets the various personalities bounce off one another. That is a great way to explore the characters without succumbing to exposition. The character’s develop in realistic ways. They require large amounts of practice in order to attain their skills with their bows and swords. Most fantasies seem to make them experts in a matter of days or with the use of the ever-popular training montage. The attention to detail is really a testament to the author’s dedication to his craft. The world that the author creates breathes very well and creates a ton of atmosphere. The same goes for the characters that are forged in the sentences as well.
Slight Spoilers: The book ends with an intense fight and a cliffhanger. It took a lot of nerve on the part of the author to introduce a cliffhanger at the end of the second book in the series. That is not a lot of time for the audience to become invested in the characters in the series. Granted, the author probably had a contract with the publisher for more than two books to be printed, but still, that is no guarantee that the readers would pick up the third volume. Luckily, the gamble paid off.
The Flaws: The entirety of the Ranger’s Apprentice series sets itself apart from other fantasy series as being among the more ‘realistic’ fantasies, in that it does not involve elves, wizards, or grand prophecies. That being said, this volume in the series does fall victim to cliches of the genre that thankfully the author grew out of as the series progressed.
First of them: The Wargals, the beasts in service to Lord Morgarath. What would fantasy be without an array of subhuman beasts who are stupid but smart enough to become an army, whose only fact is to be the arrow catchers of the hero characters. Wargals are little better than the orcs from Lord of the Rings and to be frank, it cheapens the text.
Which leads into the next thing that cheapens the text. Lord Morgarath. The Lord of Darkness trope is so overdone that it really needs to take a break for a while. He is the stereotypical exiled former ally, that now commands an army of darkness to take over the land. What makes this series so great in later volumes is that it involves quarrels between various nations and factions, all of which have tangible goals, beyond revenge. This increases throughout the run of this series and thankfully, this book is the last one where the old fantasy tropes largely die out.
This may have mentioned in the review for the previous book (Ruins of Gorlan) but at times, Will acts more like a twelve year old than a fifteen year old, and it gets pretty annoying. Considering how short and harsh life was in medieval times, he should be more mature.
Final Verdict: The Burning Bridge is the book where the author truly comes into his own as a fantasy writer and not just repeating the cliches of the genre. It sets off a compelling story arc that carries through the next two books. Things kick into high gear after this!
Four out of Five Stars.
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