Winner of the Weekly Book Give Away

For this week's winner I picked the below email.

Hello, I am fifteen, and I've been reading Henty books to my brothers over breakfast for years now, with some other historical fiction thrown in there too (No Ballantyne yet, though). Now the boys are now getting a little bit restless with the similarities of the main characters in the books. We almost always know exactly what the character is going to be like. (Don't get me wrong; I LOVE Henty! And I am by no means complaining about this.) I was wondering, first of all, what are some differences between Henty and Ballantyne, and secondly, how do Ballantyne's books differ from each other in terms of characters and plot? God bless, Hannah

Dear Hannah, I completely understand what you mean about Henty. The boys of England so loved Henty's books that it didn't matter to them if the book followed a rather commonly used story line and character formula. Honestly, you can't really blame Henty for this problem; he wrote 120 books. I understand how anyone would start repeating himself writing that many! (Comment: This was a problem that many 19th century authors suffered from.)

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