“The Last Apprentice, Revenge of the Witch” by Joseph Delaney

Started out “okay,” quickly went to “ehh” and ended as a “blah.”  The first of the ever-growing Wardstone Chronicles, it’s telling that I have no interest in reading the next book in the series.  A boilerplate fantasy, this one is ostensibly placed in a kind of late middle-ages England.  Young Thomas Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son and is tapped to apprentice under a “Spook” whose occupation is the ridding of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls in neighboring villages.  While the pen and ink drawings and large, unique font make it visually engaging, I was less impressed with the storyline and prose.  Maybe it’s a British thing, but the pacing seemed inordinately slow and the overall tone was pedantic and plodding.  Much like the last book I read, the action scenes dragged and I had little interest in turning the page to see “what happens next.”  Thomas is supposed to be 13 but comes off as a flat, too-eager-to-please 11 year-old.  He is naïve and a goody-two-shoes.  There is also a troubling undertone of women being “difficult” which I didn’t care for.  The witches in this book are all of the bad kind and “Spook” warns Thomas off from women in general quite early in the narrative.  Thomas is supposedly his mother’s favored child and he holds her in great esteem, but she reads decidedly non-maternal.  She is depicted as stern, demanding and limited in affection (maybe it’s a “Gibbs” thing??) so the childlike affection he professes seems misplaced.  Lastly, there is gory violence that is far out of spec for this otherwise tame tale.  The “Ranger’s Apprentice” series by Australian John Flanagan began about a year and a half after this book was published and there are tremendous similarities, but, IMHO, Flanagan did it better.  Reviewers have painted this as the next Farthest Shore Trilogy, with deep moral issues to plumb, but personally, I don’t feel the writing here is anywhere as good as in LeGuin’s books.  Boy-friendly, most of the young men who have read it say it is “okay” but haven’t stuck in for the long haul (also, like Ranger’s Apprentice, this series is stretching into double digits).  If a younger reader can stomach the queasier parts (“meat cakes” with a mystery ingredient is one example) then it may appeal.  As for me, I’m off to stronger fantasy fare (when, oh when, will Patrick Rothfuss finish the Kingkiller Chronicles?)