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    The Land of the Silver Apples
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    The Land of the Silver Apples
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    The Land of the Silver Apples
    Ebook476 pages7 hours

    The Land of the Silver Apples

    By Nancy Farmer

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    In trying to save his sister Lucy from being thrown down a well, Jack has managed to cause an earthquake which demolishes a monastery. It appears that sometimes, the magic just doesn't quite work out… but then he is, after all, only a bard-in-training!

    So when Lucy is unceremoniously carried off by the Lady of the Lake, Jack gives chase and follows her through the Hollow Road which lies underground. Aided by his friend, Thorgil, the berserker, and slave girl, Pega, Jack uncovers an unexpected world of hidden caves, hobgoblins, kelpies and elves - not the enchanted sprites one would expect, but fallen angels who steal human children and torment them… could this be the fate of his sister? Underground, Jack discovers that his actions will determine the fate of both worlds...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateDec 6, 2012
    ISBN9781471116537
    Author

    Nancy Farmer

    Nancy Farmer has written three Newbery Honor books: The Ear, the Eye and the Arm; A Girl Named Disaster; and The House of the Scorpion, which also won the National Book Award and the Printz Honor. Other books include The Lord of Opium, The Sea of Trolls, The Land of the Silver Apples, The Islands of the Blessed, Do You Know Me, The Warm Place, and three picture books for young children. She grew up on the Arizona-Mexico border and now lives with her family in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona.

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    Reviews for The Land of the Silver Apples

    4/5

    12 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I really liked this sequel to The Sea of Trolls. There were a couple of credulity-straining moments, but they were pretty minor when considered against the well-researched, compellingly told story. I especially enjoyed the Norse/Christian byplay- there were times I guffawed at the monks. Excellently written, highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Young bard Jack is back, with Thorgil the shield-maiden, and new companions including Pega, a freed slave. This time there's elves, hobgoblins, scary monks and okay monks, Picts, and kelpies. For reals, people! If you like your YA fantasy full of earth-loving anti-slavery young people who eshew traditional gender roles and are critical of Christian religion without being dismissive of actual Christian thought, maybe you'll like this as much as I did.
    • 4/5
      As a sequel, I felt that the book was somewhat forced, and I would have liked some more resolution as far as Thorgil and Jack (since they were key characters in both books).
      As a story unto itself I thought that Farmer proved very intriguing and creative, as usual, and it kept me pretty well hooked until the end; the plot moved along very well.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book and I finished it in one day. I had read the first book some time ago however the author pulled me right back into the story. This is the second book following the adventures of Jack, a boy how was kidnapped by Vikings in The Sea of Trolls. Having returned home things are still not quiet and Jack goes on another adventure and learns about growing up and the responsibilities that go along with it. The characters are well developed and believable. You want to know what happens to Jack and his friends and the story keeps you turning the pages. This is one of my "Just one more page" books.
    • 4/5
      Summary: After Jack returned from his adventures with the Northmen in The Sea of Trolls, life seemed to go back to normal... for a while. But ordinary village life isn't particularly satisfying for a young apprentice bard who has faced down trolls and dragons. Jack's little sister Lucy is behaving even worse than usual, but when she is kidnapped, Jack - along with a freed slave named Pega - must journey to Elfland and face creatures and dangers he's never dreamed of if he wants to restore his family.Review: While I really enjoy the world that Nancy Farmer has created in these books, I didn't enjoy this one as much as I did The Sea of Trolls. It was still a fun adventure and historical fantasy, still well-written, still uses mythology in interesting ways, and still doesn't talk down to its intended audience or oversimplify complex issues. I particularly like how willing Farmer is to even-handedly deal with religious pluralism - pagan, Norse, Christian - without getting preachy. However, I felt like there was just *too much* going on in this book to make it a winner - it started to sprawl, and it got a little hard to track all of the pieces at the same time, and remember why I was supposed to care about each. Maybe with one fewer magical creature, one fewer adventure, one fewer plot thread, one fewer pairing with hints of romance, one fewer goal to the quest, and about five or ten fewer tertiary characters, it would have been much tighter and flowed much better. It was still a fun and enjoyable listen, and kids in the target demographic (maybe 10-14?) may have less of a problem with all of the disparate pieces than I did, but I feel like it needed some trimming to pare it down to just the really great parts. 3.5 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Worth reading if you want to spend more time with Farmer's characters and in her world, but it's more scattered and thus not quite as good as the first book.
    • 3/5
      The boys would give it 3 to 3.5 stars. I just felt it was largely a re-hash of the first book. Nonetheless, the boys enjoyed it, and as my youngest said "any book with Thorgil in it is a good book."
    • 5/5
      I quite enjoyed “The Land of the Silver Apples” by Nancy Farmer. Published in 2007, as a sequel to “The Sea of Trolls”, this book can just as easily be read on its’ own.The Land Of the Silver Apples tells the tale of a journey of Jack, Pega and others to the netherlands of earth - to the land of elves and hobgoblins and other creatures of the land. In a bid to rescue Jack’s little sister from the creatures who had stolen her long ago, the party of travellers experience many adventures amongst their trials and tribulations.A joy to read, Nancy Farmer’s The Land of the Silver Apples can be enjoyed by readers of any age.D Bettenson, member of Goodreads.com, Librarything,com, BookDivas.com and the Penguin book club.
    • 4/5
      Jack, the Bard’s apprentice, sets off on a rescue quest when his sister Lucy is kidnapped by Elves. His companions are an unreliable slave/rightful-heir-to-the-throne and a recently freed girl-slave who worships the ground Jack walks on. They meet many magical creatures, re-discover some old friends, and have lots of exciting adventures along the way. I thought this was an excellent sequel to Sea of Trolls. It expanded the mythology of the land while developing the characters already introduced in the first book. I really appreciated the way Farmer handled the three religions that were represented by her characters in this 790AD Britain-based world. She showed the power and beauty of the Pagans as well as the Christians and subtly made the point that they all got their believers where they needed to go—but she did this without forcing the point or lecturing, which is the sign of excellent story-telling! My only quibble about this book is that most of the major plot threads were completed by page 400, leaving 100 pages for the final (and least pressing) plot thread. This is why the book got 4 instead of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      Something goes dreadfully wrong at the ceremony to kindle the need-fire. And that leads to a pilgrimage to St. Filian's Well by the Bard, Jack, the newly emancipated slave Pegga, and Jack’s father and sister Lucy. But at St. Filian's Jack unwittingly sets off an earthquake and Lucy runs off with an elf, so what started as a pilgrimage turns into an underground rescue mission to Elfland.As she did with Norse mythology in The Sea of Trolls, Farmer now mines Celtic and Germanic mythology and folklore in its sequel. Her mixture of characters, Pagan and Christian, Saxon and Viking, human and non-human, provide humorous counterpoint to each other on the way to and from Elfland as they battle monsters and spells with the aid of (mostly) friendly hobgoblins and in spite of the beautiful but callous elves.
    • 4/5
      The Land of Silver Apples by Nancy Farmer is the second volume in her Sea of Trolls Trilogy. I was totally enchanted by the first book, but this one didn’t quite cast the same spell upon me. I found it overly long and it wasn’t able to hold my interest. I also missed those rough and tumble Viking characters. I also found the Nordic mythology much more interesting than the Celtic myths that were explored in this book.In this outing Jack’s spoiled and unlikeable younger sister is spirited away by elves and Jack, after his magic goes astray and he accidently causes an earthquake, is sent to both recover his sister and find the water that drained away during the quake. His companions are a slave called Brutus, a disfigured girl called Pega, and Thorgil, the shield maiden. Along the way they fall in with hobgoblins, whose king decides he has fallen in love with Pega, and meet both a priest and a half-elven princess that play an important role in the story. The story of Jack’s sister has been resolved and I am glad to see the end of the unlikeable Lucy as a main character. The last book will probably deal with both Torgil and Pega, and hopefully see Jack become the bard that he is training to be.