First of all, this book is pretty interesting, because its capturing world and good characters. I would absolutely recommend this book to all those beginners who read fantasy. Still, it could have been so much better. Even though you are fascinated by reading it, you feel that somehow this book is a bit too long for you, and that the writer failed to do something.

It has a reason. Hobb does her best to juggle in the conventions of the apprentice story in fantasy. This book contains the lonely youngster, the father- character, the friend that dies, the jealous enemy, the pretty unreachable girl and of course the militant background. But, Hobb fails to use her limits to create something new and brilliant, as it is in Ender’s Game, A Song of Ice and Fire, Warchild or even Harry Potter. Actually, instead of having a complete and concise strocture to build the story, the plot is all mixed up. Fitz is always being transformed from one thing to another, most of the time so that we cannot understand why and how ta hell,till even he cannot figure out who he is.

This mess hurts not only the story but, shame, the characters. When we cannot understand what happens to Fitz, we stop understand and identify with him either. Eventually we can’t show interest in his choices. Same with the other characters. A lot of siquences could have been easily deleted from the plot, that simply has too many people in it. Sometimes, when a character is in the scence, you have to go a few pages backward to tell who it is exactly. The result is that even the writer gets confused, as we can see very well in the end, a really lame and misunderstood one.