Ranger’s Apprentice: Ruins of Gorlan

Author: Rick Riordan

Illustrator: Jeremy Reston
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
Summary: Will is small and lives in an orphanage. He hopes he is going to
become a knight. On the day of choosing, he gets rejected by the fighting
master, but he gets accepted by a ranger called Halt. Rangers are people, who
spy and are the eyes and ears of the kingdom. When he starts training, he got
introduced to his weapons and he got a pony. One day, when several knights
and Halt and Will go on a boar hunt, Will makes a great contribution to the
death of the boar. The next morning, he gets a praise from the baron. Will and
Halt go to a ranger meeting a few weeks later and there they discover that a
villain ordered to his army unit of 2 Kalkyres (3 metre beasts, that are deadly)
to secretly enter the kingdom and hide there somewhere. Those Kalkyres were
then ordered to kill the important people like the army general, the king or a
ranger. Will, Halt and another ranger called Gilan to go find them and kill them.
They go to the plains of Loneliness and find traces of the feet of the Kalkyres.
They follow these traces. It is then decided that Will takes Gilan’s horse to go
warn the king and get some help and rides the two horses by switching every
hour, while Halt follows the Kalkyres and waits for Will and the help he gets.
Gilan does not like that, because he will have to walk to get to the place where
the Kalkyres are, but then he thinks about it and agrees, so Will and Halt leave
him behind. Halt rides only to find that the Kalkyres are going for him and he
fights them. Will arrives with help and together they kill the Kalkyres with Will
making the final and saving all of them. Will gets an offer from the baron to be
a knight, but he declines it…

My opinion: The book has an engaging story and is perfectly balanced between
the plot and the description. The genre of this book is adventurous and
historical. I liked that the main character Will eventually wins despite his small
stature. I was surprised that this book is so easy and fast to read. I really liked
Will, who is smart, kind and thinks things like me. Overall, I really liked the
book, and I would give it a score of 97/100