A review by rhganci
The Sorcerer of the North by John Flanagan

3.0

Alas, all good things come to an end, and Flanagan’s run of putting together stories that were successively better than the previous ones has come to an end. Book 5 just doesn’t hold up to the standard that was set by the previous one. The big problem: jumping ahead in the chronology. It just doesn’t work for me, as many of the unanswered questions—and the nature of the open ending of Book 4—seem to go ignored, forgotten, or passed over, and I feel rather unsatisfied, as the promise of answered questions Flanagan so superlatively executed throughout the first four volumes ends here; it seems like a new story, and it reads a lot like the first book did the first time I looked at it. To be sure, this could mean that the next installments will make this one better, but with Cassandra’s role in the story vanishing into nothingness, and with a lot of the good relational stuff that made the first four books so winning left to paragraph-long back story, the overall novel takes a hit. The story was good—it’ll be better when we get the rest of it—and the tidy, hyper-idealistic nature of the world Flanagan creates still remains. He only wants the things that he has prescribed to go wrong to, well, go wrong. Any other inconvenience is passed over, and this perhaps keeps the books to such a uniform length. August, hopefully, will bring the resurgence of the RA series, and perhaps a development or two that will connect what is going on to the salient events that have already occurred.