A New Darkness (Starblade Chronicles)

This review contains spoilers if you have not read the book read no further. What?!! Tom dies that is ridiculous. Also how is the rest of the series going to go on without Tom? He is one of the main characters. But the ending was a awesome cliffhanger. Tom better be alive.

I enjoyed the Last Apprentice so I was pretty excited to finally get started on this follow up series.

As far as the whole concept goes I enjoyed the threat from a different land and I think the Kolabos make excellent enemies. Also Grimalkin was definitely a favorite character from the original series, but that is about the extent of what I liked about this book.

The way the plot was moved along felt weird and forced. The dialogue also felt forced, it was even worse whenever Jenny was involved. I dislike her tremendously. Her inclusion in this book drastically took away from my enjoyment.

I will most likely end up reading the next two books since I am already 14 books invested in the overall world. But at this point I do not have high hopes. We will see if book two turns out better.

I hadn't read the other series the LAST APPRENTICE and now I wished I had! It says that you don't need to read the other series before you read this, which you don't, but I really want to know more about these characters!

I felt that the first few chapters had to explain a lot of back story, which was nice for someone who hadn't read the other series...but I felt like it took too long to get into the action. When the action finally did start (around chapter 7) I couldn't put the book down. There were times where I was on the edge of my seat with worry that the main character (Tom) wouldn't make it through. I think Delaney did an awesome job on describing the ghosts and boggarts to where I could picture them in my head.

With the addition of the character Jenny, his newest apprentice, I think that this really helped make this not a gender specific book. Both boys and girls will be able to relate to the characters, which is nice because with Fantasy it's usually one or the other. Plus, Jenny is a firecracker and won't let her being a female apprentice get in the way of her dreams.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I think middle school students will flock towards this series, especially if they have the LAST APPRENTICE SERIES. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and intense action. I would also recommend reading the other series first to get a better idea of the characters and setting.

read this book because I have always been fascinated with the seventh son of a seventh son. I remember watching a few movies regarding this scenario that I really wanted to give it a try. I also enjoy fantasy, so this book was definitely for me.
Plot: This is about an apprentice to begins to apprentice a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Because of her heritage, she had powers. The apprenticeship is quite detailed so the reader can get into the story rather quickly. If you enjoy all things witches, spooks, magic then you will really enjoy this story.
Tom/Jenny: I have to say that one aspect I really enjoy was their relationship. At first, Tom is really mean and even blows off Jenny as nothing. Jenny is a strong willed girl, fighting her way to an apprenticeships. When she wants something she goes after it. I rooted for her because I loved her determination to make something of herself when others, including Tom, told her she couldn’t. Tom is nice guy who I think can learn a lot from Jenny. Well, they can both learn a lot from each other. They have a very good and open friendship but I am hoping that maybe something more will happen between them. They do get into each other faces a lot and it would be neat to see they confront their feelings.
Ending: The ending is quite good and leaves the door open for plenty of more adventures. I can’t wait to see where the story goes to next.
A New Darkness entales a great adventure of fantasy and magic. Nicely written, A New Darkness is great.

I will start this review by stating that I absolutely love the Last Apprentice series. When I found out about this new series that continues Tom Ward’s adventures, I was quite excited. However, once I started reading the book, I felt that the writing did not excite me or draw me in as much as the previous BOOKS did.

Criticisms:

Jenny
She annoyed me. I really wanted to like her character, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t see any point to her being in this book other than to be the first female apprentice. Most of the time, she just seemed to be pointlessly tagging along. Maybe she would have fit in better if she had actually done something important to the plot. Overall, the book would have been more interesting if her character had been saved for a later series.

Boredom
I spent much of the BOOK checking how much farther I had left to read. Because Tom defeated the Fiend in the previous book, the dark was very quiet. This lack of action made the read slow and boring. I miss the frequent threats of the dark from the previous BOOKS. There was the threat of the Kobalos, but they didn’t attack much. I find that the read would be much more interesting if less time was spent on Jenny’s story/training and if more was spent on Tom’s fight against the Kobalos.

The Ending
The ending of the book seemed too abrupt. If Jenny really was recording the events, she wouldn’t just stop at that moment. Along with that, why would she still record the events in Tom’s journal if he was alive after all?

Overall, I enjoyed being able to enter the world of the Last Apprentice series again. However, the book didn’t have the same magic and intrigue as the previous BOOKS. I give this book a rating of 3.5 stars because it was enjoyable overall, but did not live up to my expectations.

The author for some reason put a silly little girl to kill monsters of the night and it's just gets worse after that !! Her demeanor is of a nosey scared girl with the courage of a mouse .who can't do nothing but screw things up and knows everything about everything so she ends up being the teacher not the student.

3.5 stars

When I saw this book available for review, I leapt at it. I’ve been meaning to start Delaney’s The Last Apprentice series forever, but was, once again, daunted by the number of installments (13, not including the various bonus stories).

In A New Darkness, I thought I’d found the perfect solution—I’d get to see what all the Delaney fuss was about without having to commit to another long-running series.

I was so very, very wrong.

I know I don’t pay enough attention to blurbs. It’s a problem, and I own it. But this time . . . this time, I’m almost positive that I did read it, b/c I specifically didn’t want to request A New Darkness if it was a continuation of the previous series (b/c OCD).

Whatever. The current, just-before-publication blurb, clearly states that it is, in fact, a continuation, but that no prior knowledge is necessary to read and understand this book. And maybe that’s true . . . I’m not sure if what I was feeling while I was reading this was confusion or frustration, b/c whether I needed to have read The Last Apprentice was kind of irrelevant to me . . . b/c I wanted to have read it.

Half of the book was throwbacks/mentions/this-one-times from the other series, and while we were given enough information for it to make sense, it was painfully obvious that there was more going on that was flying right over our heads.

I don’t like feeling ignorant. I would even go so far as to say that I HATE feeling ignorant.

I felt ignorant the entire time I was reading this book.

So that was a problem. Another problem was that I felt like I was reading an historical accounting of the events in the book . . . but in realtime? Which was strange . . . but the feeling made more sense when right before the first POV change, a point was made by the character that they were writing everything down in a journal.

But while, in theory, reading someone’s journal may sound highly entertaining and full of juicy tidbits, in reality . . . unless you know the person incredibly well (your sister, your girlfriend, etc.) . . . it’s really not.

As for the characters, not only did I feel like I didn’t know them very well, but I didn’t particularly like them either. I’m guessing that Tom Ward is the last apprentice, and Grimalkin seems like an immensely interesting character, but yeah . . . in this one book . . . not enough development to make a lasting impression. And without context, Grimalkin just comes across as the scheming, manipulative witch that Jenny fears she is. Jenny . . . I initially liked her, but as the story progressed, she became more and more judgmental, and more and more surly. She badgered Tom into taking her on as his apprentice, but then she does nothing but second guess him, and complain about his instruction.

And the new enemy . . . this is a personal peeve of mine, so it probably won’t bother you unless you share my peeve, but I’ve never been a big fan of humanized animals as characters.

And it probably has something to do with going to see Guardians of the Galaxy a couple of weeks ago, but when this “new darkness” was on the page, all I could see in my head was an evil version of Rocket. I think the Kobalos are supposed to be more wolf or fox-like, but yeah . . . Rocket. *shrugs* Even if I could force myself to see beyond that, I’d still be seeing something pretty awful:

[image]

Any WoW players out there? Say hello to your friendly neighborhood kobold. *shudders*

And don’t even get me started on that cliffhanger. I wasn’t even that invested in the story, and I wanted to throttle someone.

So yeah . . . if you’re a longtime fan of the series, I’m sure A New Darkness is an excellent addition to your well-loved world. But if you’re thinking of using this book to take the easy road to exploring the widespread fascination with Joseph Delaney . . . you might want to think again.

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: A simple, easy read with admittedly cookie-cutter characters. I didn’t read the first series in this world, but there was enough summarizing for me to understand.

Opening Sentence: There was a cold draft coming from somewhere; maybe that was making the candle flicker, casting strange shadows onto the wall at the foot of the bed.

The Review:

Tom Ward is one of the County’s newest Spooks. After his master was killed in a fearsome battle, he was forced to fall into one of the most dangerous roles one can undertake in. He deals with ghosts, ghasts, boggarts, and witches — everything that goes bump in the night. The job isn’t easy, but it must be done. It seems trouble is brewing beyond his homeland, though, trouble that will eventually rock the peace he has worked so hard to produce. With the help of a new apprentice, a girl named Jenny who is the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, something unheard of, he will face a new, worse battle than ever before. Something is coming, an enemy the likes of which even Tom Ward has never faced…

This novel is the beginning of a companion series of sorts to the original books about the county Spooks. Was it confusing for me to delve into a book where all the world-building was completed in the last series? Well, at times. Something the author did well was recalling everything that happened in previous stories, though make no mistake, it was sometimes hard for me to sink into feelings about certain characters when all I got was recollections of memories. Like Tom’s old master. Tom missed him gravely, and often thought about him. But no matter how many times he thought about his bravery or how wise he had been, I never felt any remorse, because I never got to interact with the character as a reader. If one has already read the author’s first (pretty popular, from what I’ve heard) series, they will probably feel more connected to Tom’s pain and other emotions. I mean, I understood what had gone down, but I didn’t feel much about it. It was a lot of telling instead of showing — “I missed him.” “I was sad.”

As far as the characters go, I respected them and understood them, but I didn’t connect. A lot of that has to do with them blabbering on about memories from the past that I didn’t get to read about, but just got a quick plot summary of. The story was narrated by two characters, both of whom I found myself liking. They had very similar minds, which was somewhat offsetting considering Jenny’s bright and snarky personality was so different from Tom’s. It wasn’t hard for me to sink into their personalities, however, the writing style was simple and flowed easily. I wish that there had been a chapter or two from Grimilakin the witch’s standpoint. Now that would have been an interesting twist to see how her brain worked. She was the most intriguing of all the characters, even the main ones, whom were sorta boring.

The story felt really short. That might be because there wasn’t a bunch of little action-packed events — rather, all the events were part of a carefully orchestrated larger plotline. It was clear that there are going to be a few more books before this larger conflict resolves itself, especially after a certain cliffhanger at the end and a couple myths that seemed to be coming true. For the most part I liked that, how everything was pretty clear, though the story might have used some complexity to add interest. Sometimes stuff felt super convenient, like people coming or things happening exactly when they were needed.

I’ll be honest. I’ve been putting off reading A New Darkness for awhile. I was freaked out that it was a companion series, considering all that I had missed and the whole world that had been built up in another series. I think that if I had read the first series I may have enjoyed myself more in this one, with the world-building more rich and the character development clearer. Tom Ward had developed in the last series so that there’s not much developing left for him to do. I think mainly that job is for Jenny, now. Altogether, I thought the book was a pretty easy read with a simple enough plotline and admittedly cookie-cutter characters. I would definitely encourage lovers of the last books to give it a try!

Notable Scene:

“Listen, I’d better tell you what’s up so that you won’t get your hopes up. To become a spook’s apprentice you have to be a seventh son of a seventh son. That gives you some immunity against witches and enables you to see the dead and talk to them. That’s the basic qualification. I might as well be blunt. You’re a girl, and you don’t qualify.”

“I’m the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter,” she said. “And I can see the dead. Sometimes they talk to me.”

I turned and looked back at her- a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter with those powers . . . ? I’d never heard of such a thing.

“I’m sure you can,” I replied. “But I just don’t need an apprentice. Have I made myself clear?”

FTC Advisory: Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins provided me with a copy of A New Darkness. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review.