The book I’m reviewing is called “Lord Brocktree”. It is part of a brilliant series, written by someone called Brian Jacques. The series is called “Redwall“, and you learn what this is by reading all the books. I have read nearly all of them, as most are in the County Library. Instead of human characters, it’s about (please don’t laugh) animals, and it’s set in a type of medieval time. Most of the series takes place in Redwall, but “Lord Brocktree” takes place in Salamandastron, the home of the ancestral Badger Lords. The prologue is really interesting, and I can tell that the author put a lot of effort into it, just so that if you pick up the book and read the first few pages, you will become hooked and won’t be able to stop reading. The book itself is split into three “books” because in the prologue you find out that the story is actually being told by one of the Badger Lords.
The plot itself is (spoiler alert) about a wild-cat called Ungat Trunn, who tries to storm and take over the mountain with a massive army. The mountain is guarded only by a handful of hares and one extremely old Badger Lord. After witnessing” the horrific slaughter that ensues, the story switches to the view of a hare called Dorothea, who finds the last remaining Badger Lord, and persuades him to try and come with her to Salamandastron. The rest of the story switches between the views of the ten survivors of the slaughter in Salamandastron, and Dorothea and Lord Brocktree, the Badger Lord.
I would definitely recommend this to a friend for a few reasons:
- The only hard-to-read words are ones that refer to special objects or people that only exist in the Redwall series.
- One word and you are hooked.
- It is written so well that even if you don’t know a word, you won’t even have to try to think about it, you just look at the sentence, and you understand.
- It has an epic plot and you would have to read every book to understand the grand scale of things.
- There are more than ten books in the series, so that encourages you to read them all.
As well as it’s amazing writing, the book also features many pencil illustrations. These pencil illustrations are very useful for finding out what animals look like (any idea what a sea-rat looks like?). The illustrations were done by David Elliot, who also does the illustrations for The Great Tree of Avalon series and also does some illustrations for the Time magazine!
Overall, I think this book was amazing. It was professionally written, it had great illustrations, and since it is chronologically the first book in the series, it is a must-read for fans of the series (which is quite a few people [this book has sold over 50,000 copies]). I think it deserves a 99.999999%.
By Luke (Rang VI)
March 13, 2013
