I Weary of a Stupid Hero

By the end of Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy, I see that he takes a page from the Wheel of Time's reluctant hero, Rand. Except Fitz is far more than reluctant hero. He is just stupid. In the first two books I could forgive it because he is just a teenager. But as he ages, and even admits understanding and takes on new resolves, he immediately forgets them the next day in some fit of anger or his misguided sense of justice. If I'm going to dedicate 39 hours of my life to a third book, I expect some personal growth from the main character. Even the wolf has better sense.

Having said all that, Hobb is masterful in making me care! So in spite of all the tedium and lack of ongoing personal, sustained understanding by the main character, I cared what happened to Fitz and all the other characters. Hobb does a good job of developing all of them, and even getting right to the heart of the feelings of the female characters. He pulls together all the story lines and resolves them. I laughed out loud at the resolution of one of the tiniest story lines that I would have expected to be dropped out sight.

I was ready for the end but was vastly disappointed in that Fitz finally achieved what he wanted. A life of his own choosing. But his decision about what to do with it continues his reign of stupidity. I could have sat there at the end of the audio and picked through how everyone else chewed him up and spit him out for their own gain, blaming them for his final decision. But then I remember how the "catalyst" created every situation all by himself. The ending is, indeed, tragic. And because Hobb somehow made me care, I cried.

Boehmer is a good narrator and makes the characters easily understood.

If you have read the first two books, you will want to read the last one. And there is no place within it I can say, "you can skip all this and go right to here." You'll have to slog through. Focusing on the Fool will get you through it.

35 people found this helpful

How To Ruin A Series

Long, painful, and frustrating, with an unbelievably unfulfilling ending.

Book 1 was good. Book 2, ok fine. Book 3....dear god it was like one long train wreck, with a crying baby and someone scraping their nails across the chalkboard the whole time. By the end, you are just praying for the final explosion of the train to be big and glorious, hopefully incinerating you and everyone else. But instead the train derails into a swamp, slowly rolling to a stop, with your cabin mostly submerged, leaving you to die a slow and bitter death, drowning in the muck that is the sad and pointless ending to a sad and pointless book.

27 people found this helpful

JUST BECASE A MAN CAN DO A THING

DOES NOT MEAN A MAN SHOULD DO A THING
This is getting a five star rating, because the first time I read it that is how I felt. I must admit that listening to it after reading it was tedious. Don't get me wrong it had nothing to do with the narrator, he was good. It is just not a good reread.

SHE OFFERED ME NO MORE SOLACE THEN A MAN MIGHT FIND IN HIS OWN HAND.
This just went on to long. Usually in a trilogy the second book is the stretched out book. This time it is this the third book. Most of the book is run across the country, get captured, escape. Once would have been fine, but more then once was over kill. This was like a travel log with no plot.

STOP WHINNING ABOUT IT AND JUST DO IT.
Fritz is a lot more whinny in this and it is pretty long winded. If you have not started the trilogy yet, let me say that I liked the Live Ship Trader series best, starting with Ship of Magic. I am also really liking this Dragon Series that I am three books into right now, but the series is already four books long and may go longer.

22 people found this helpful

Story Became More Irritating

After great start with first 1.5 books of trilogy, the last 1.5 books became never-ending situations of ineptness and self-loathing for the main character.... leading to cycle after cycle of running, capture, torture and escape. Since the main character is "writing" the story down as the narrator, it's sort of stupid to send him through so many beat-down situations - you know he lives.

The plot sets up situations you can see a mile away, but the stupidity of the "hero" leaves you shaking your head. It's just hard to grasp that the villain has ZERO consequences through 3 books until the last few pages. His plots are known by everyone at the end of book one and there were no consequences???

The one bright spot was Paul Boehmer - one of the best jobs I've ever listed to.

21 people found this helpful

Makes you hate the protagonist

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Characters keep secrets for no reason and generally do not act like people. The main character who is lovingly humble in the first book comes off as winy and miserable to the point of being EMO in this one. With little to no catharsis in the ending it is my recommendation that if you enjoyed the first two of the series, do not pick up the last one.This would have been infinitely better if the author had not tortured his character constantly without it really forwarding the plot its a bit weird to be honest...

What could Robin Hobb have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Even out the good with the bad. Its fine having a character go through hardships that they overcome but this guy doesn't ever seem to overcome anything. He just gets mangled and eventually saved by someone else and he is usually not bettered by the experience.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Paul Boehmer?

Yes. Paul Boehmer was great.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

the first book.

17 people found this helpful

Solid, But Full of Digressions

I guess it’s a reflection of the low-bar I have in mind for “high fantasy” work that this strikes me overall as pretty solid work. I continue to be impressed with Hobb’s ability to paint a scene from her imagined world with the kind of relevant detail that makes it seem to come to life. Even at her worst – and this is the worst of the four Hobb books I’ve read – she has a gift for solid writing that puts her in the forefront of this genre.

I have long complained about the slowness that grips her work – I can’t believe a good editor couldn’t cut out 30 to 50 percent – but until now she has avoided the writerly sin that plagues others I’ve read in this vein. (I’m tempted to call it “Jordaning” after Robert Jordan who swelled his promising Wheel of Time stuff from what should have been a 1200-page book – still quite long – to 12 novels of 800-1000 pages each. Yeah, I jumped off that wheel, but not without the frustration that he had a shot at something as excellent as Dune, the first one, if only he’d had a clue how to stay focused.)

That is, she pursues tangents to the central story line that serve little purpose in moving the plot forward but that certainly thicken the spine of the published book. Here, she sends Fitz off on a “fool’s errand” to kill Regal. It takes up about the first quarter of the book, and it proves both fruitless and pointless. SPOILER: By the end of the book, we learn that keeping Regal alive and skilling him into submission is a far better revenge and a far more responsible move. Well before the end, we discover that Fitz should be on his way to find and serve Verity; anything else is self- and nation-destructive. I can see that from page one, and Fitz sees it eventually, but we have to go through 200 pages before he gets it.

That kind of digression – and it’s the longest but not the only, there are all sorts of 20-page experiences where they explore inconsequential places or build-up to events that aren’t worth the attention when they do occur – hurts the narrative, but it also hurts the premise. I don’t enjoy feeling “Jordaned” (in one book, he spent hundreds of pages marching an army across his continent only to have them get to the end and turn around – and they were an army so much less powerful than the forces of the world that it never made sense in the first place why they were involved) as a reader, but, more subtly, I find myself questioning the otherwise dependable perspective of Fitz. I like that he’s flawed, that he doesn’t understand other people and that he lets his passions get him into trouble, but I trust he is still bottom-line smart enough to get the big things right. In the first quarter of this, though, he’s just so foolishly caught up in his plan that I want nothing to do with him. If I hadn’t already invested 1100+ pages in him, I’d have bailed. (I might have bailed anyway if not for Hobbs’s generally fine writing at the basic sentence level.)

Alongside that core flaw there is the further frustration that this becomes increasingly a kind of “Deliverance meets the Lord of the Rings.” Fitz or Night Eyes endures terrible beatings all the time. We get arrows in the back, beatings to unconsciousness, and grievous loss of blood and strength. Our main characters come within millimeters of death every couple hundred pages, but they always rally. Hobb tells us about their suffering and maiming in gruesome slowness, but then, without any comparable attention to their recovery, they pull off feats of deep endurance the next time they’re called to do so.

I’ve led mostly with the complaints. In the end, I do think Hobbs’s vision has some compelling elements. SPOILER: Her notion of what it means to wake a dragon grows thoughtfully out of the theme she’s been pursuing throughout the trilogy: the challenge to find a way to connect with others. The magics of the skill and the wit accomplish some of that, but the work of opening up to someone else is itself a powerful magic. (The scene where he connects with Kettle, opening the burn of her skill-mind, is one to think about. In the end, beyond the magics in play, Fitz has to be able to hear a frightened other in order to bring her around.) One wakens a dragon then, by giving up ones entire humanity. You put your life – not your strength but your memories, joys, and hopes – into something inert and that quickens it. The process isn’t all positive. It means dying. It means, as we see from the resting place of the older dragons, turning eventually to a kind of stone that hungers for more life.

(A further SPOILER complaint: since it turns out to be so easy to wake the other dragons – to put blood on them and use some fire or some fairly simple combination – why does Verity have to sacrifice himself to become a new one? I get that it makes for a better story, but it’s a narrative clumsiness Hobb falls into. As a free editorial suggestion, wouldn’t it work to require a new dragon to wake the old ones?)

Anyway, it staggers me to think there are another nine or twelve after this one. I’ve enjoyed these three enough to finish them – and that’s no small matter given how long and sometimes tendentious they are – but I can’t see going on. I might take 15 minutes some time to read a few reviews and see what I missed, but I’m done. It’s a shame that Hobb, who really does seem more talented than the others in this genre, is invited to write such long works. I feel as if her work, and the whole genre, would be better served with tighter writing and a commitment to better editing.

14 people found this helpful

Bland to the end

Despite my thorough disappointment at the first two books, I completed this series on a recommendation. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Needless to say, there was no payoff in the end.

10 people found this helpful

Sci-Fi Fantasy doesn't get much better than this

What made the experience of listening to Assassin's Quest the most enjoyable?

The characters, Ms. Hobb has created a great group of living, breathing, flawed, and unforgettable characters.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Trying to pick a favorite character between Fitz and Fool and Nighteyes is like having to decide which child is your favorite, to pick one is impossible.

What does Paul Boehmer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He does a great job, he doesn't over power the story with his voice, he brings it to life. Not once I did think about the narrator as anything separate from the story.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Impossible to say without spoiling the story for others

Any additional comments?

Please bring the Tawny Man series to Audible.

8 people found this helpful

Held my interest, but had ridiculous ending

I enjoyed this book. Fitz makes a long journey, traveling as a peasant that seems real. Hobb does a great job relating the adventure in a believable way. The interaction of Fitz, Burrich, and the Fool was quite excellent.
I give the story three stars because the climax was very silly. It was a resolution that reminded me of a children's book. The defeat of the seemly unstoppable red ship raiders was barely mentioned, and the explanation of the great mystery of forging was glossed over in a couple sentences.

7 people found this helpful

Glory and Heartache

FitzChivalry Farseer???s life keeps getting worse. He has once again barely ??? and I mean just barely ??? survived Uncle Regal???s machinations. As Assassin???s Quest, the third book in Robin Hobb???s FARSEER trilogy, opens, Fitz???s situation seems hopeless. Only a couple of people know he still lives and Molly is not one of them. She???s gone, and it seems safest for Fitz to let her live in ignorance.

Meanwhile, Fitz???s uncle Regal has declared himself king in the Six Duchies. He demands exorbitant taxes, has abandoned Buck Town and left Buckkeep in the hands of a foreigner, and has in essence given up the area to the Red Ship Raiders. Not only has Fitz suffered at Regal???s hands, the coastal duchies suffer too.

Once Fitz is standing on his own two feet again, he decides to get revenge for what Regal has done to him personally and to the Six Duchies. But Regal is protected by a coterie of skillers and some rather nasty soldiers. As Fitz tries to hunt down Regal, Prince Verity begins skilling to Fitz and asking for help. Fitz is the only person who knows that Verity still lives, but it???s not long before Regal discovers that both of his worst two enemies, FitzChivalry and Verity Farseer, are alive. Of course, Regal wants to get them before they get him.

Assassin???s Quest takes a while to really get going, and there???s some rehearsal of old events, but I think it had to be that way ??? Fitz???s recovery must be slow, or it wouldn???t be believable. Hobb puts this time to good use, though. We learn about Burrich???s childhood and grow to love him even more for what he sacrificed for Fitz. Molly also becomes even more admirable as we see her trying to make the most of her unfortunate circumstances.

Once Fitz is able to travel ??? and there is a lot of traveling ??? the pace is still slow, but by now the reader is so devoted to FitzChivalry Farseer and his wolf that it feels more like we???re spending time with old friends than trying to get through a novel. Along the way we meet a few new characters, most notably the minstrel Starling and a mysterious old lady, and eventually Fitz falls back in with some characters who we already love and have been missing. Besides the slow pace, which I really didn???t mind too much, my only complaint is that I had a hard time believing that Fitz doesn???t want Molly to know he???s alive. This felt like it was contrived to break my heart, but I must say that it worked.

In the end there is some glory for Fitz and the Six Duchies, but it???s accompanied by much heartache. This isn???t one of those fantasies where everyone lives happily ever after. Readers should know that though this is the end of the FARSEER trilogy, Fitz???s story continues in Robin Hobb???s next trilogy, THE TAWNY MAN. I???ve been listening to Tantor Audio???s excellent version of FARSEER and so far they have not put TAWNY MAN on audio, but they do have LIVESHIP TRADERS, a related trilogy on audio. I hope we???ll be seeing TAWNY MAN in audio sometime soon because audio readers are not going to want to wait for it. Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.

7 people found this helpful