At the expense of requiring some preamble before the main body of today’s post, allow me to point out that Amazon put out what it’s describing as the “Main Teaser” for its upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
In brief, the show will be detailing the Second Age as detailed in the section of The Silmarillion called Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age — which despite its name, focuses primarily on the Second Age, since the climax of the Third Age is depicted in the text of Lord of the Rings.
In perhaps even briefer, this series will be the events are build up to the war in the prologue of the Lord of the Rings movies, though the series itself has no connection to the earlier movies beyond the source material.
I bring this up because all this hype means Lord of the Rings has been on my mind lately, which has ultimately got me thinking about a book series that owes a clear debt to Lord of the Rings, perhaps even more so than most Fantasy series…
And that series is Ranger’s Apprentice.
The Ranger archetype has become a mainstay in the Fantasy genre, particularly of the Dungeons & Dragons-influenced variety and the archetype of the archetype is Aragorn.
Which brings us to Ranger’s Apprentice,
a series about a young man drafted to a minor league deal by New York’s hockey team who, essentially, gets taken on as the sidekick of a character who’s basically Aragorn.
Now, that’s a good person’s sidekick to be, because Aragorn is awesome:
Sidebar to the sidebar: Aragorn’s not locked in here with the Uruk-hai. The Uruk-hai are locked in here with Aragorn.
Also, that kinda sets the stage for what Ranger’s Apprentice feels like from a conceptual standpoint. Calling it “derivative” or “generic”, while probably accurate also feels a little over dramatic and unfair.
Sure, Ranger’s Apprentice is leaning pretty heavily into archetypal characters and plot beats, it’s at least doing it well and does manage to put some fairly unique touches on things we’ve seen before.
Honestly, I’m a little ashamed that I didn’t have Ranger’s Apprentice as recommendation off the top of my head.
Mostly, I have major criteria for my recommendations. Except when I don’t…
One, I’m trying to keep my recommendations at least tangentially related to the style and setting of Realmgard. And, two, I’m trying to keep my recommendations at more or less the same reading level as Realmgard, which is turning out to be an issue, because I didn’t read much older kids’ or YA books when I was at that age.
Happily, Ranger’s Apprentice fits both of those criteria. So let’s get into the actual recommendation.
Honestly, Ranger’s Apprentice isn’t a great series, but it is a good series. And sometimes, “Good” is good enough.
The world itself feels a little under-cooked, both resembling Every Fantasy World Ever and having all of the various countries in the world having names borrowed from real life: the equivalent of France is Gallica (the Latin word for “Gaulish“), Ireland is Hibernia (also Latin), Italy is Toscana (the Italian name for Tuscany), Japan is Nihon-ja (Nihon being the Japanese word for… “Japan”).
Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com
Now, I don’t necessarily mean this as all that much of a criticism. I’ve done the same thing in some of my writing, because names are hard. It’s also mitigated by the fact that the series’ focus isn’t necessarily on the big, broad international scale.
Sure, the countries end up fighting pretty major wars with each other, but the focus of the series is primarily on the individual characters.
The character archetypes are all pretty familiar: the orphaned hero destined for greatness, the tomboy princess, the hero’s stoic mentor, the cartoonishly evil overlord, angry vikings, unstoppable steppe warriors on horses.
But why mess with what’s worked for the history of the genre? And, they may not be all that novel, but the characters are still well-written and their adventures are competently delivered.
And, perhaps most notably, author John Flanagan has clearly done his homework when he writes about most of the elements of real, day-to-day life in a Medieval world.
He pays a lot of attention to the details of things like combat, the logistics of fighting a war, and the particulars of culture and government. He also pays attention to a lot of the details of a lot of fairly specific, specialised things like archery and sailing.
The broad strokes of the world may feel kind of underdeveloped, but the ground-level view of the characters and their daily lives is well-done and presented with a lot of attention to detail.
That’s probably the series’ greatest strength and the thing that manages to stand out in the genre that it otherwise cleaves so closely to.
My biggest complaint, such as it is, is that the series’ major story arcs are delivered across multiple books — the first three books, for example, all detail the same ongoing battle with the same one bad guy — who, incidentally, has a crew of bear-ninjas who scare people to death.
This means that you can’t really read just one book and come away with a satisfying conclusion. This is perhaps a necessary evil with the intended audience — reading 200 pages three times is probably easier and more appealing to a ten-year-old than reading 600 pages once.
The overall story arcs are solid, but some of the individual books can feel kind of frustrating in how bad they get hit by Middle Part of a Trilogy Syndrome and are subsequently unable to function as standalone stories.
On the plus side, the publisher seems to have recognised this and it’s pretty easy to pick up the series in multi-book packs.
Which is what I did, and which probably made the reading experience a lot better, because I could treat the three-book story arc as a single entity and just immediately start reading the next one. I’d probably recommend going this route.
So, to conclude: Ranger’s Apprentice, good, not great, but good enough can be good enough. Also, much attention to detail.
Probably not a gourmet dining experience, so to speak, but sometimes all you really want is a hamburger.
Go read them.
Also, go check out my other recommendations.
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