"Ranger's Apprentice, Book One: The Ruins of Gorlan" by John Flanagan

I finally had the time to dip into this very popular series and it was a satisfying entry.  "Ranger's Apprentice" is pretty standard fantasy fare without heavy-duty magic.  Think more along the lines of Lloyd Alexander and less Madeleine L'Engle.  There is the young boy without a sense of where his life is going; an older, if not mysterious, mentor; a growing sense of purpose and a good number of fights along the way to the big uber-battle.  The attraction of boys to this series is easy to see.  With lots of action, a few valuable life-lessons, and only the slightest hint of "girls" this is one has enough blood, yet enough intelligence, to appeal to a broad range of male readers.  John Flanagan is one of the growing number of Australian authors gracing bookshelves these days.  For the most part, he writes well.  The story has the nuts and bolts found in all fantasy novels but is original in the details.  The characters are fully drawn and the lead character, "Will" is both appealing and accessible.  Mr. Flanagan keeps the action moving but puts in enough specifics to get a substantial feel for the world that he creates.  Perhaps my favorite element in his writing is the relative depth to both characters and plot-lines.  Nothing is simple or clean.  Things progress as they should (and, at a couple points, exactly as I expected them to) but there are edges to each event and the reader can easily see any element of the tale fleshed out to include stories upon stories (which is why, I'm guessing, that this series is now up to 12 books??)  The only two hiccups for me were relatively minor.  First, there was no map!  Which was mostly just curious, since all fantasy novels of this type seem to include them.  Keep in mind that there is always an external journey in these things, which is typically reflective of the main character's bildungsroman (don't you love fancy words?)  Anyway, it wasn't a big deal, just a bit surprising, as I had to imagine all the "travels" into mountains and far-off lands.  Since books are about using one's imagination it shouldn't be a reach to picture it all in your head.  More off-putting was the author's habit of changing point of view from paragraph to paragraph (sometimes sentence to sentence) which slowed me down a bit in reading speed, as I had to double-back more than once to keep track of who was thinking what.  The overall story, however, was short and engaging enough for me to get through in under a week, so the narrative voice(s) were not a major issue.  In a word, this was a very "solid" first book.  Glad to have it in the collection and feel more comfortable than ever recommending it to a wide base of readers.