Normally, I like Robin Hobb. I loved the Farseer series, as well as the Liveship series. However, I’ve hit a snag in this one that I just can’t seem to get over.

The story moved well, at the beginning. But, I’ve hit a portion of the book where she feels the need to beat one notion into the ground over and over and over…Yes! I understand that [insert thing] is important! I really, really do. Can we please move on, now?

I think I’m going to have to do some serious skimming to finish this book.

Robin Hobb (sic) is ambiguous. Her books are fantasies in every since of the word, swords and socery, heroes and love, boy done good fables (go west young man!) and deeply escapist.

By all rights, they should be dreadful, and I suppose by some measures they are.

And yet, these ambivalent heroes and their coming of age stories are deeply enjoyable. Much of it is her intentionally drawing on the grand traditions of story telling, and more of it is her lovely world building, that gains more momentum and depth from small details and careful observation then grandoise big ideas.

If Tawny Man let you down, this is more of a return to form to the earlier Farseer work, for the better, with a bit of the exoticism of the Liveship books without some of the Liveships work characters/plotting.