Book Review: The Last Apprentice - Revenge of the Witch by Joseph Delaney

With all the fantasy novels filling the YA and teen racks of late, you can almost find anything you want. The hardest problem I have is sorting through books to find one that really stands apart from the rest. There are tremendously good reads out there, but after a while, even the good ones start to blur together.

I picked up Joseph Delaney’s The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch because of the cover alone. It just looked different, old and somber, and – well – sort of creepy.

The setting of the book seems to be 300 or 400 years ago, in England. The land is filled with small villages with interesting names and deep, rich histories. Tom Ward, the protagonist of the novel, lives next to Hangman’s Hill, where a lot of soldiers were hanged after a particularly fierce battle. Sometimes at night, those soldiers can be heard moaning and their weight still bends the branches and shakes the trees.

Tom is 12 years old. The story is told in first-person, which makes him immediately identifiable and pulls the reader in close. He’s the seventh son during the era of primogeniture - the English law that stated that a farm was given to one son, usually the eldest, so the land wouldn’t be divided up until it was worthless. After the father gave the land to the firstborn, he tried to find apprenticeships for the rest of his sons.

By the time Tom’s father got around to him, he’d begged about all the favors he could from skilled craftsmen. As a result, Tom gets apprenticed to Old Gregory, who is known as the Spook, responsible for chasing off ghosts and boggarts, and for binding witches. No one in any of the neighboring villages truly counts him as a friend, and most avoid him when they see him coming. Unless they’re beset by ghosts, boggarts, or a witch.

But not only is Tom a seventh son, he’s the seventh son of a seventh son, which marks him as something extraordinary. He has powers beyond most men, and perhaps even beyond that of the Spook.

After he’s apprenticed to the Spook, Tom goes on a journey with him, going through a test, then ending up at the Spook’s house where many surprises await him. One of those surprises is the living witch buried in a pit covered by iron bars in the Spook’s garden. Tom also learns that many of the Spook’s apprentices ran away over the years, but that the last one was killed by the witch.

All of that becomes grist for the mill as Tom strives to understand the new life he’s taken on. I absolutely loved the countryside and the world Delaney is building to take his readers through. It’s calm and simple, and it's easy to understand what’s at stake.

Article Author: Mel Odom

Mel Odom is the author of over 100 novels. Winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award for 2002 and runner-up for the Christy in 2005, he's written in several genres, including tie-in novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and novelizations of Blade, XXX, and Tomb Raider. …

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