The Sergeant's Apprentice (Schooled in Magic Book 11)

As he writes books they get better. Emily is growing more and more. The author is very good at tying the books together. Lots of insight for long time readers. Maybe hard to understand if you have not read the rest of the series. Looking forward to the next book

I've become rather addicted to Christopher Nuttall's books, and the Schooled in Magic series in general. Nutall uses the series as a way of deconstructing genres, and in Sergeants Apprentice he looks hard at the War Fantasy Genre. As an author myself I see Nutall book case studies of how to write well across genres.

Overall id definately say this was a good addition to the series and we see a lot of character development in the book.

But this book features a really large scale battle and in my opinion it seemed rather flat. Emily is viewing the battle of a surrounded city from "a battlement" and later from a watchtower with no real description of how she got from one to the next or how she can see all these things happening. The city is completely surrounded and while we get a rundown of the attack we have no idea of where anything actually is in relation to anything elseor how much time has passed. I would imagine the battle took most of the day, but after reading it im not sure if it took an hour or a week. It felt more like i was reading a script for a movie where it was just "cue this" or perhaps an outline of what the author wanted to cover. Sure it gets the barebones across of whats going to happen, but its not nearly as good as the actual movie or the writing ive come to expect from Mr Nuttall.