The Burning Bridge (The Ranger's Apprentice, Book 2) (Part 1 - Overview & Theme)

Hello, all. I hope you’re all ready for another journey into the world of The Ranger’s Apprentice.

After I first read The Ruins of Gorlan back in high school, I’d intended to keep going on to the sequel, The Burning Bridge. For some reason, I never got around to it. Revisiting The Ruins of Gorlan reignited that interest. And, since the library makes getting the sequel a lot easier, I saw no reason to delay from reading onwards.

Step softly now. It’s time to go hunting.

STATS

Title: The Burning Bridge

Series: The Ranger’s Apprentice (Book 2)

Author(s): John Flanagan

Genre: Fantasy (Middle Grade)

First Printing: May 2005

Publisher: Puffin Books

SPOILER WARNING

Mild spoilers for The Burning Bridge will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.

Unmarked, heavy spoilers for The Ruins of Gorlan may be used as necessary to support this review. I will also assume that you have read the review series for that book, though doing so won’t be necessary to understand this review.

STRUCTURE

Not going to lie … this review got away from me very quickly.

When I started working on this review, I honestly assumed that it would be two parts. Maybe those parts would be slightly on the longer side, similar to the last book, but I didn’t think I’d need more than two posts to cover everything.

The thing is that there is actually a lot to be discussed. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. And I think that, if the Fantasy genre as a whole is going to recapture the audience trad-pub seems hellbent on repelling these days, we need to dissect why exactly the good parts work and by the bad parts don’t.

So … we’ll be splitting this review into four parts.

• Part 1 (Today)

  • Premise

  • Target Audience, Prose & Content Warning

  • Rating

  • Theme

• Part 2 (Sunday, August 30th)

  • Worldbuilding

  • Characters

• Part 3 (Sunday, September 6th)

  • Plot

• Part 4 (Sunday, September 13th)

  • Spotlight on Plot Contrivance

PREMISE

From the back of the 2008 American paperback edition, we get:

Evil Returns

For years, the Kingdom of Araluen has propsered, with the evil Lord Morgarath safely behind the impassable mountains. But the scheming hand of the dark lord has not been idle. . . . When Will and his friend Horace, an apprentice knight, travel to a neighboring village they discover the unsettling truth. Could it be that Morgarath has finally devised a plan to bring his legions over the mountains? If so, the King’s army is in imminent danger of being crushed. And Will and Horace are the only ones who can save them.

Reaction

This premise spells out the book very concisely. Technically, the “neighboring village” is actually the neighboring kingdom of Celtica, but in practice, that doesn’t change the stakes of the story. This book promises and delivers a follow-up to the war footing established at the end of The Ruins of Gorlan.

TARGET AUDIENCE, PROSE & CONTENT WARNING

If this series is going to take a turn towards Young Adult, that transition is nowhere to be seen here. This is another solid Middle Grade Title.

Will (and Horace - really, any character who is not an adult) reads more like a 5th or 6th grader than a teenager. Emotions and motivations are spelled out and repeated. 3rd Person Omniscient POV being used to erase any nuance. The book leans a bit more into humor, and said humor is the sort of teasing or slapstick one might expect to find in a Saturday morning cartoon. Not to say that this disrupts the tone, mind, just that these a jokes that are optimized for elementary and middle school students, with diminishing returns for older readers.

The content has stepped up slightly. There is a lot more violence and death, to the point that we are Shown a tertiary character dying from a battle would while Halt is trying to interrogate him. Much like the previous book, though, everything is very stylized, and there’s no gore.

RATING: 8/10

The Burning Bridge is a solid title. A lot of the things that I didn’t personally enjoy about it were easily excused by the target audience. I’m sure I would be a lot more impressed by the twists and character development if I didn’t have an adult’s level of exposure to the storytelling devices being employed. Even as someone who isn’t in the target audience, I would still recommend this book (provided, of course, that you can still connect to Middle Grade prose).

Even with that endorsement, though, this is a much weaker title than its predecessor. The plot relies on multiple contrivances; the largest of these is so severe that I’m only kept from calling it a plot hole by the fact that it’s somewhat justified by character. One of the twists is so transparent that I’m pretty sure even the target audience will immediately see it coming. Much like the bullying subplot of the predecessor, this book also inefficient subplots - that is to say, these things don’t make the story worse, but in retrospect, it feels like they could have been streamlined and achieved the same goal.

This book also lacks the resonant theme of its predecessor. Theme isn’t necessary for a story, of course, but it can elevate it. After the standard established by The Ranger’s Apprentice, the lack of such a theme in this one feels like a steep downgrade. Again, that doesn’t make the book bad, but it does make it feel far more forgettable.

This is such a shame, because there is a lot to like about this book. Flanagan makes some genuinely bold narrative choices - so bold, in fact, that I ended up increasing this book’s rating once I had time to really think about them (which is why this rating is higher than my original reaction on social media). It’s just that he didn’t quite reach the bar he set for himself with the first book.

THEME

On the matter of theme … I’m not saying that there’s no theme at all. It’s just that it’s a lot less impactful. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that I’m not simply reading a theme into the text that isn’t intended to be there.

The main plot of the story is Will, Horace, and Gilan (a character introduced in the last book, who is Halt’s former apprentice and the Ranger I mentioned who wields a sword) traveling to Celtica on a diplomatic mission to prepare for the impending war with Lord Morgarath. We’ll get to why Horace is on this adventure when we talk about the plot. In Will’s case, he is here because the opening action scene of the book had him freeze up the first time he faced actual combat with Morgarath’s monstrous Wargal footsoldiers. Halt thinks that sending Will on a mission where he isn’t there to provide oversight will help Will rebuild his confidence.

For about the first half of the book, Gilan acts as a mentor figure to both Will and Horace. He has them train both against himself and against each other to sharpen their weapons skills. Around the halfway point, he has to part ways with them, but he puts Will in an unofficial leadership role over Horace.

This all pays off by the end of the book. In Will’s case, the experience does help build his confidence, leading to the bold decision making that serves as the climax of his personal arc. Horace is also about the apply what he learns in the climax of his arc. There is a through line here.

… I’m just having trouble nailing down what it is.

Beyond a generic “learning” vibe, I can’t tell you what this book is actually trying to say. Don’t let a failure discourage you from ever trying again? Be humble and open to learning from others? These aren’t bad messages, especially for children’s media, and nothing in the story contradicts them. The issue is that I’m guessing that these are the message based on example seen in other works. They vanish into the background without that context. Given how incredibly unsubtle this book is with everything else, and given how the last book gave its theme proper focus and even a scene dedicated to a final thematic payoff, I have a hard time believing that Flanagan suddenly chose this moment to be subtle.

PLACE AND PEOPLE

The Burning Bridge follows the precedent of its predecessor, with simple characters operating within a low-magic setting. For the most part, I feel like what we get in functional. There are just a few choices that feel a bit questionable, particularly in regards to Flanagan setting up Will’s Love Interests. (Yes, now there are two.) The analysis is coming your way next Sunday.

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