I read the first three with my younger brother a few years ago, and we both enjoyed them well enough. We never made it past the third one, since at that we didn't make many trips to the library, and then for a while we didn't make any. They were interesting.

I find it hard to believe that you guys think the plot was cheesy! Well, maybe certainly it was nothing way out there and brand new, but Flanagan is an awesome writer--good enough that I can overlook his rather frequent use of mild language--and the twists he throws in, along with the clever plots the Rangers and company always hatch are things that I read and then sit back thinking: 'drat, I wish I'd thought of it first'. Still, the first books are the best, they slowly get worse, and his new series isn't nearly as good.

Love these books though!

The first book of his new series, The Brother Band, is at the library, and we got it out, but we didn't get time to read it. It isn't as good as his RA books?

I was thinking of getting the brother band tomorrow.

If I do read it i'll be sure to post a review.

Ok, great.

Not as good, and I might have liked it better had I not read RA first and had my expectations raised so high. XD I enjoyed the story and the characters very much, but it felt almost like Flanagan didn't care for the story himself, or else he just didn't realize he was being repetitive. He explains things to the reader--like a list of nautical terms in the front, which, btw, were explained as if to eleven year-olds; no offense to them of course, but I think most of Flanagan's readers are older than that--and then pauses to explain them again later--like telling you what all the nautical terms mean once he reaches each one in the story. It was irritating to me, but I still enjoyed it.

Brotherband thread here.
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=6425

*is a loyal fan to the original RA series and a loyal fan to the author because she met him*


No, not the most original story ever, but unlike a lot of copies, Flanagan really pulled off an original slant on an old theme. Plus it's funny. Humour wins over all.


The series just gets cracking after the third one. My personal favourite is "Erak's Ransom" because it has almost all of the main characters in it, and some new ones that makes it lively.


I don't think the series slowly got worse. Yes the first books were the best, but then all the characters were young, and everything was new. The last two in the whole series were my least favourites; I believe Flanagan could have ended the series at "Halt's Peril" but then again, I'm not the author.

I'll agree with BushMaid....

My favorite might be Erak's Ransom considering I read it six times...But as the series goes on it gets better and worse like hills.
The miniseries within the entire series on Halt was the best. Specifically Halt's Peril.

You met him, BushMaid? That's awesome!
I may try finishing the series--see, I just admitted that I haven't. But the last I read was Halt's Peril, which was...okay, but when I finished it and put it down my thoughts were exactly this: 'that was an utter waste of my time'. Not that I think I'm too good to read something I don't like, not at all. But I didn't see any reason why I should have read it. The plot wasn't half so clever as the first several--which is why I liked them so much. It also wasn't as funny. And, well, nothing really happened. (For those who have not read Halt's Peril, I shall now resort to spoiler code.) All we get in the book is a bit of tying up loose ends, Halt almost dying--and you KNEW he wouldn't--and some reappearances from old characters, spotted with a bit of the usual Flanagan humor and wit. That was all.

I read Ranger's Apprentice last month, and liked it well enough to read the first sequel---but by a chapter or so into the third book in the series, I was to the point of uttering the "Eight Deadly Words" ("I don't care what happens to these people!").

Part of the trouble, I suspect, is that the coming-of-age story (and this kind of coming-of-age story in particular) is one of the most common plots in modern fantasy. It's not that these (at least the first few) are badly done, but ... "this again?" And other authors' takes on the trope have been far better written and constructed (though the ones I'm thinking of have their own faults that would make me hesitant to recommend them here).

Another issue is that, to me, they "feel" ... artificial, I guess, or commercialized---like a series designed to manipulate the reader into buying the next book. Part of this is the cover design and series marketing, which is typical of "chapter book"/early-YA series of the last decade and a half or so, but which I grew very tired of before I finished middle school, but it goes beyond that---even the plotting feels like it's artificially constructed to manipulate me into reading "what happens next," like a serialized story in a magazine with an indefinite length (a form that I'm grateful to say seems to have fallen out of fashion the last few decades if not before), only with installments that are the length of novels rather than short stories. And, as I mentioned in the Herald's Hall thread on "sneak peeks," I don't like crass or overt manipulation in the construction or design of the books I read.

But isn't that a sign of a good author and a good story? Getting you to read more? I guess not, if you decided you didn't care about the characters and felt like bashing their heads together, throwing them off a cliff and then pointing them in the direction they really ought to go.

As a 'coming-of-age story--which I like to say I don't read but I suppose I actually read a lot of; just the fantasy versions because they aren't so often boring and sappy--it's okay, maybe not the best, and maybe it's not that original, either, but Flanagan is a clever author and even old plot points seem new at times with these stories.
I agree that the series went on way too long. Way too long. Ten books? Ten and a half, I suppose you might say, if you count The Lost Stories.

Something else I remembered liking about the series: The world. It's not that creative and new, but it's not supposed to be. Everything is supposed to feel old and familiar. I mean, it's Europe, in essence. Sure, they travel to the desert--something between Arabian and African, but the places the characters live in is England and Scotland and Wales and all that, only under different names.

It depends. An author can make me feel like reading more by writing well, developing the characters, vividly describing the world, and so on ... or by ending the book on a cliffhanger. One is providing evidence that the next book is worth buying; the other is manipulation. Now, it's OK to end on a cliffhanger sometimes, especially if this works well with the story---but when it's plainly artificial, and the pacing indicates the series will last as long as he feels like keeping on churning them out (i.e. he doesn't have one big story that's so long it has to be divided into several volumes, he has lots of little stories tied together by cliffhangers), I quickly feel like I'd rather go without learning how the current problem gets resolved than read another word.

I wouldn't go that far; I just don't care whether they solve their problems, keep having adventures, or just die. I'd rather go without learning how they solve this problem and get into the next than read another word.


I only read the fantasy ones myself, so I was actually talking about "coming of age" as a fantasy plot.

Whereas for me even the somewhat original elements felt very old. The first book, like I said, wasn't bad at all. After that, pretty much everything made me think, "This again?"
I don't mind the coming-of-age plot as such (there are some authors who do it very well); the problem is that it's one of the most common plots in modern fantasy, and so an author's take on it has to be better than "not bad" to avoid feeling like a cliché.

If it had been a proper series---either one mostly-independent story after another, or one story traced through several volumes---that could be fine, though few authors are good enough to carry off a series that long very well. The problem (from the few books I read) was that he kept introducing the next story at the end of the previous one---the best thing to do there would have been to chop it off there and start it in its own volume. And it probably didn't help that (unless they were written long in advance of their publication ...) he was writing on the order of at least two volumes a year.


Mmm. That I can live with, but other than that the worldbuilding was simply sloppy.

LOL

I thought the adventures were pretty self-contained, except for the first three, possibly four, books which dealt with the same villain and the general chaos they have to clean up after him. After that, they were all just adventures with some over-arching themes and minor plots.

I'll admit that one of the reasons I enjoyed them so much was Halt. I mean, who doesn't like Halt? I'm a huge sucker for those dark and mysterious and sardonic characters and I know it all too well. It got to the point where in my own stories I had to have at least one person like that as a side character in every story. And then I got so annoyed because that character would not go away that I decided I didn't like that character so much. Or, at least, that's what I keep telling myself. I still like Halt, though. XD

And, yes, the cliffhangers bothered me. But cliffhangers generally do and that's the point of them. Where cliffhangers are concerned, I don't think the author--and author--much cares whether or not it's a good plot point, they just want their readers to sit back and groan. (They probably intend this to be 'whats-going-to-happen-next-and-will-I-die-before-it-happens' sort of groans instead of the 'oh-dear-goodness-you-cannot-be-serious-this-is-getting-ridiculous' groans.) I think Flanagan did push the series too far, but the series itself I still like. A lot.

See, I didn't even finish #3. #1, obviously, didn't start in the previous volume (as there wasn't one), and is structured as the first half of a two-volume story---that's fine, and competently (but, in retrospect after reading both halves, not expertly) done. #2 finishes the arc started in #1, then starts the arc of what should be #3, then abruptly ends. Either he's so novice a writer that he doesn't realize he overshot the end of the book, and his publisher (who's responsible, by the way, for the gimmicky-feeling marketing---the Wheel of Time proves that it's possible to give all the volumes of a series a consistent appearance and make them look classy; these feel like the publisher tried to do the same thing on a tenth the budget and got "tacky" instead of "classy") didn't assign him to an editor who would point this out and fix it, or he's deliberately playing with the reader's emotions. I'd like to assume the more charitable interpretation---but which one is that?


In my opinion, sometimes a cliffhanger is the natural or best place to end a chapter or a volume, and sometimes it's not. I don't mind cliffhangers (except that they bother me in the "give me more nownownownownow" sense), so long as the author doesn't make a habit of them, but when there's so obviously a better and more natural place to end the story it rankles, and if the series is merely competent and "not bad" there are far better uses for my time than reading further.

(By the way, "expatiate" is a word I've not met before.)

By "marketing" I mean the cover design (which is fairly consistent across the series, and similar to other YA series the publishers intended to be popular) and the "more books in this series/more books by this author" advertisements in the last pages of the book (and I would include the author's biography as printed on the back cover or the dust-jacket if I could remember it well enough); I haven't seen any other "marketing" stuff for the series.

But the design and presentation, as I've tried to explain in previous posts, gave the subtle impression of ... crass commercialism rather than professionalism. The covers are not the sort of lurid painting that SF and fantasy publishers seemed to impose on every novel for a few decades, that every author worth reading was ashamed of, nor the classy-but-presumably-cheap abstract art that was "current" in SF for a while, but they're not the professional-painting (meta-)style that's currently popular in fantasy either. Instead, they look like an attempt to do something basically like that last (the current trend in fantasy covers) without going the expense of a more-than-competent artist. (They would get points for not contradicting the books, except that the covers picture characters rather than scenes, and so are so close-up that everything relevant from the book would have had to be in the commission anyway.)

And instead of, like the really excellent fantasy (that is complemented by excellent visual design because it deserves it, not because it needs it to sell), tying the various volumes of the series together with a consistent art style and a subtle mention of the series in one corner of the cover, they have the series name at the top in contrasting colors in type almost as big as the title---something I have only seen in "YA fantasy" and "chapter books" aimed at readers who aren't inexperienced enough to tell that it's mediocre rather than great. Early last century, books printed on (cheap) pulp paper (and sold for pennies) got the stigma that the writing was as cheap as the paper they were printed on---and in most cases rightly, since the authors churned them out as fast as the readers would buy them---yet they sold like hotcakes because a) they made books available to people who couldn't afford better-quality (in terms of printing and binding) books, and b) because they provided an escape that "literature" didn't. This way of marking series is something I've seen only on similarly mass-produced fiction.

The advertising at the end of each volume (or maybe only the paperbacks---I read the first in paperback and the remaining one and a fraction in hardback) looked rather crass, but that's par for the course with some publishers, so I wouldn't remark on it---except that it gave publication dates for all the books in the series so far, ten in five years just in this series. And I know that some authors could probably maintain that pace without sacrificing quality if writing were all they had to do---but since the writing is almost the least part of the project, a pace of two books a year for several years (while he was also presumably starting his other series) suggests the implication that either the author, the editor, or both are skimping on quality. (That pace for a year or two wouldn't be worth mentioning, as we'd assume he had the first several written already, waiting for a publisher---Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time started with two volumes a year, then slowed as the publisher caught up to him. But for five years and more?)

That's all I can think of at the moment. I don't have the books to hand (we were lent the first one, then got the next several from the library, and we've since returned all of them), so I can't look at them again ...

The first and second books were good. They didn't seem real after that. I noticed a few small plot holes too, though I don't remember what they were anymore.

Is it just me or does the author use the words 'philosophical' and 'clandestine' quite often?

I probably liked the simplicity of the series,I suppose. You have to remember I haven't read Tolkein, so I didn't have any reference for any clichéd-ness it might have had.



Haha! Yes he did use 'clandestine' a lot. Did anyone get confused with the whole "honey in the coffee" scenario?

Yes! I still can't figure out who likes/doesn't like the honey in their coffee.

I vaguely remember that bit, but not enough to explain it...I think I understood when I read it though.

Getting back to actually replying to my list of HW-threads-to-reply-to after more than two months ...



That's ... not quite right. The Ranger's Apprentice series are marketed (in the cover design, blurb style, and in-book ads for sequels) the same way as several other series I've encountered (mostly in the sections of the public library and of the school libraries that are probably now called Young Adult, one step or a couple of steps up from "chapter books")---which as a class seem to be trying to imitate high-quality books without caring about actual quality---sort of like Xanth or Robert Asprin's MYTH books, but for one reading level lower.



It's worth noting that none of the truly excellent series that I am aware of has a series logo, but just about every one of the mostly-second-rate "hack-work" ones has one.


Yes. It took me to the end of the second book before I got that tired of it, but "yet another [insert-adjective] fantasy, sigh" roughly sums up how I feel about it.

Yes! Ranger's Apprentice!

Language content, I first realized in Book 5 - the dog and its mean owner...

Other than that - great book, funny, descriptive, he likes making love triangles, I can see...

At this moment, my dad is watching news stations yelling at the TV because of the debate, and thus, I am finding it hard to concentrate.

Ranger's Apprentice is a story... I read somewhere 10th century, 950 AD, or something like that... Not sure where it was from, though.

So it is set in the past, and, thus, can be set in Europe. I enjoyed thinking that this story was set in the past, medieval times.

Especially Book 10, the unexplored Eastern areas - China, etc.