Book Report: The Last Apprentice, Revenge of the Witch

When Your Humble Blogger gets the chance to go to the local public library without the Youngest Member, what does he do? Goes and browses in the Teen Room. This is not because I particularly want to be in the presence of teenage girls, or teenage boys for that matter. But that’s where they put the YA/SF, and (as you’ve noticed, Gentle Reader), I read an awful lot of that. At one of the branch libraries, the YA shelves are over by the New Books, very near the circulation desk. At the other branch library, the YA shelves (or shelf, anyway) is in the Children’s Books section. But in the main branch, they have a whole room for Teens, with quite a good selection, and a New Books shelf as well, and now and then a creepy-looking middle-aged guy skulking around. That’s me.

I decided to pick up the first book of the Last Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney; I hadn’t heard much about them but I often figure with a series that if I like the first one, then I’ve got a good list of books to pick up when I don’t have anything else on hand, and if I don’t like it, then I’ve saved myself the wonder every time a new one comes out. I wonder, sometimes, what it’s like to work for a publisher of this type of book (HarperCollins, in the case of The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch), and read a book or pitch or sample chapter or whatever. Of course, from the publisher’s point of view, if you can know from the start that it’s going to be a series, you can market it as a series, and the first book can have Book One printed on it, and all that good stuff. On the other hand, these people are (often, I would guess) readers as well, and I imagine that they respond as readers in addition to responding as employees of the corporation.

And sometimes, when you read a book that is perfectly good (and Revenge of the Witch is a perfectly good book, if a little heavy on the spooky/scary for my taste) in itself, you just want to think of it on its own, and not as the starting point for a series of merchandising events, each a bit desperate to claw back a trifle of the spark of the original. Or sometimes, I wonder, if you (if you are in that kind of position) have to advise the author to leave out this good bit or that bit of resolution or another bit of world-background because it will help from a series point of view to have those in the later books, even if it leaves this one a little thin.

I do see the publisher’s point of view, of course. And when I was a kid, more or less the intended audience for this book, I avoided one-off books because they were over too soon, and read trilogies and series stuff like popcorn. And as I said in that first bit, I doubt I would have picked up this book at all if it hadn’t been very obviously the first book in a series. So it seems uncharitable of me to complain about how much this book feels like its strengths that didn’t match the particular demands of a series were suppressed. I am aware of the conflict, though. And I don’t even work for a publisher.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.