The Devil’s Apprentice – Blog Tour

Welcome to the blog tour for The Devil’s Apprentice. It is the first novel in ‘The Great Devil War’ series by Kenneth B. Andersen. I am thrilled to be part of another The Write Reads blog tour! There are a lot of great posts to check out including a great interview with the author, which includes a mention of the movie rights being purchased by Amazon! Very exciting! Without further ado, here is my review of The Devil’s Apprentice.

The Devil’s Apprentice – Book Review

Kenneth B. Andersen’s The Devil’s Apprentice is really fun, refreshing and easy to read. It is a YA fantasy novel, which leans more towards a middle grade level. I accepted an invitation for the blog tour based on it’s great reviews on Goodreads and I also really liked the premise of the book.

Philip is a good boy. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a mix up and he is sent to hell to become Devil’s heir. Lucifer has no choice but to train Philip up as his apprentice. Unsurprisingly, Philip is not good at being bad. Trapped in the underworld Philip has no idea who to trust. When an evil plot against the dark throne is discovered, he has to decide if he really is a good boy after all…

Characters

Philip is the protagonist of the novel and is the epitome of a good boy. He is intelligent, kind, considerate and caring. Well, at least to begin with… I really like Philip’s character and found myself invested in his decisions. He starts off seeming rather simplistic but it is interesting to see how his moral compass adjusts as the book continues. The author has given him a young voice, which works really well and makes the book SO easy to read. I honestly devoured it!

Lucifer is a fun character, full of personality and you can’t help but like him even though he is the king of darkness. When I was reading it I didn’t know if there was going to be a redemption arc for Lucifer or if Philip was going to turn to the dark side. You’ll have to read it to find out!

Other characters I really enjoyed were Satina (a tempter), Lucifax the demon cat, Grumblebeard the gatekeeper and the truly evil Sam.

World Building

Kenneth B. Anderson creates a very vivid world in The Devil’s Apprentice. The area that we explore in the book is not vastly expansive but has a lot of flavor, meaning that the world has a very strong core. I hope that this is expanded upon in the rest of the series as there are a lot of really interesting areas mentioned and places left open to explore. You can tell I love the setting by the fact that I am desperate to find out more about the wider world.

I really like Hell seems like a strange sentence but there we go! The town is such an interesting mix of being evil yet kind of quaint in parts. Pretty houses with well-tended gardens, winding streets, orchards with rotting fruit, pretty lakes of…. fire. One of my favourite aspects of the book are the imaginative creatures in Hell. The hushers are awesome. I love how Hell has it’s own community with so many different kinds of ‘people’.

Themes

Religion is a fairly obvious theme since the book is based around the devil and hell. There are a surprising amount of religious references woven into the book as part of the story. Don’t worry though, this is not a book that is trying to convert you or ram a religious message home. It is a little like Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens in that sense. A large part of the plot is based around moral choices and good vs evil.

My Thoughts

The easiest way for me to explain how much I enjoyed this book is simply to say that I immediately wanted to read the next one! It is a really different and refreshing book. I highly recommend it for when you are in a reading slump as it is so easy to read. The world building is my favourite aspect and there are plenty of interesting characters. I can’t wait to see what happens in the rest of the series and will hopefully be able to find out when I have some time over the holidays! If you enjoy YA and middle-grade fantasy novels and stories like Good Omens then this is definitely a book that you should pick up. It is currently free to read with Kindle Unlimited!