In this first iteration of the twelve books in the Ranger’s Apprentice series, a boy named Will
become-though this may come as a surprise to some people-a ranger’s apprentice. Will, a
scrawny fifteen-year-old boy finds himself learning the ways of rangers after being taken in by
the famous and rather grim ranger Halt after being rejected from battle school, the one thing he
had always wanted in life. This is a result of believing that his father had died as a knight and
that he needed to honor that by becoming one himself. So Will’s start as a ranger is always
slightly haunted by his rejection from battle school, but this seems to fade with time. In fact, it
does entirely: at the end of the book when he is offered the chance to become a knight and he
turns it down, realizing that he is a ranger at heart. And all of this, in writing, sounds like a pretty
standard adventure novel with struggles both emotional and otherwise, but I believe that it is
more than that. While it isn’t hard to entertain me with a book, not every book engrosses me as
this Ranger’s Apprentice book-something that goes for every one of the books in the series. It is
an excellent read and I believe that it really is ageless in a lot of ways much like how Harry
Potter is. While you will certainly never get any real challenging thoughts from the book, it is
still easy to entertain yourself with it anyway.