Fool's Assassin by Robin Hobb
I'm happy to have finished it in 24 hours without missing any work appointments, getting some sleep and even managing to spray an acre or so of weeds!
I'm glad I read reviews by people who had advance copies, so I was prepared for the Fool not making an appearance until late in the book, and Fitz having another child late in life. One review complaining about the slow pace says:
The Scene: three characters in a pub, ordering food: Fitz ordered the soup with carrots, potatoes and bread. Riddle ordered the soup with potatoes, carrots and bread. And I ordered the soup with potatoes, carrots and bread. That isn't verbatim, but it is very close.
Since I was prepared for a slow start, I quite enjoyed the first few hundred pages of country life at Withywoods, but after that it started to drag. I wanted to stay up last night until Fitz and the Fool were reunited, but gave up on that at midnight. I got up at six so I could read for another couple of hours before a conference call, and at that point I was still waiting!
There were some nice early references to the Fool that kept me rolling along happily during first half, especially:
I loved that man as I have loved no one else
but also:
And truly, my missing the Fool today was no different from how I had missed him on any of the yesterdays I’d spent without him. So he had sent missives to Jofron and not to me? That had been true for years, apparently. Now I knew of it. That was the only difference.
Molly's first scene, telling Fitz what to wear for Winterfest, didn't endear her to me and I wasn't at all sorry to see her killed off - though it would have been interesting to see some interaction between the Fool and Molly.
I'm sure Bee is a very interesting character, but long sections about young children just aren't to my taste. Did it not occur to anyone to check whether there was a physical reason she wasn't talking before her tongue was accidentally torn loose? I did enjoy Wolf Father.
I found this confusing, after the Skill-healing and sharing bodies in Fool's Fate: I had never been absolutely certain of his masculinity.
Fitz stabbing a decrepit beggar for simply holding his child was the first thing he's ever done that really made me dislike him. How about asking a few questions first?
The ending certainly makes sense of the title, but I'm not thrilled with the Fool saying "You were good at it, once. At killing people. Chade trained you and you were good at it."
when in Assassin's Quest he says:
"You were never really good at it, you know."
At least we have Fitz and the Fool sleeping together again - that's something!
My favourite non-Fool-related scene was Fitz attacking the man with the bull-dog, and helping the dog to an easier death.
The typos annoyed me, when I know so many fanfic writers who can do better. I particularly didn't like "FOOLS ASSASSIN" with no punctuation on the header of every Kindle Cloud Reader page. (Though the cloud reader itself was great - what a wonderful world we live in, when we can pre-order a book with a click of the mouse and have it delivered the instant it's released, even without owning an e-reader!) And what does this sentence mean? "[Jofron] lifted a mottled cloth from her work desk and wiped vainly at her seventeen."
Robin Hobb's continued overuse of the word "rebuke" annoyed me too, as it did in some of the previous books, and having a digital copy let me quantify the problem. 38 times in one novel is too many. There are synonyms for this word!
I might reassess in a few days when I've done some rereading and it's had a chance to soak in.
Starting the long countdown to the next book... then the next one...
I'm glad I read reviews by people who had advance copies, so I was prepared for the Fool not making an appearance until late in the book, and Fitz having another child late in life. One review complaining about the slow pace says:
The Scene: three characters in a pub, ordering food: Fitz ordered the soup with carrots, potatoes and bread. Riddle ordered the soup with potatoes, carrots and bread. And I ordered the soup with potatoes, carrots and bread. That isn't verbatim, but it is very close.
Since I was prepared for a slow start, I quite enjoyed the first few hundred pages of country life at Withywoods, but after that it started to drag. I wanted to stay up last night until Fitz and the Fool were reunited, but gave up on that at midnight. I got up at six so I could read for another couple of hours before a conference call, and at that point I was still waiting!
There were some nice early references to the Fool that kept me rolling along happily during first half, especially:
I loved that man as I have loved no one else
but also:
And truly, my missing the Fool today was no different from how I had missed him on any of the yesterdays I’d spent without him. So he had sent missives to Jofron and not to me? That had been true for years, apparently. Now I knew of it. That was the only difference.
Molly's first scene, telling Fitz what to wear for Winterfest, didn't endear her to me and I wasn't at all sorry to see her killed off - though it would have been interesting to see some interaction between the Fool and Molly.
I'm sure Bee is a very interesting character, but long sections about young children just aren't to my taste. Did it not occur to anyone to check whether there was a physical reason she wasn't talking before her tongue was accidentally torn loose? I did enjoy Wolf Father.
I found this confusing, after the Skill-healing and sharing bodies in Fool's Fate: I had never been absolutely certain of his masculinity.
Fitz stabbing a decrepit beggar for simply holding his child was the first thing he's ever done that really made me dislike him. How about asking a few questions first?
The ending certainly makes sense of the title, but I'm not thrilled with the Fool saying "You were good at it, once. At killing people. Chade trained you and you were good at it."
when in Assassin's Quest he says:
"You were never really good at it, you know."
At least we have Fitz and the Fool sleeping together again - that's something!
My favourite non-Fool-related scene was Fitz attacking the man with the bull-dog, and helping the dog to an easier death.
The typos annoyed me, when I know so many fanfic writers who can do better. I particularly didn't like "FOOLS ASSASSIN" with no punctuation on the header of every Kindle Cloud Reader page. (Though the cloud reader itself was great - what a wonderful world we live in, when we can pre-order a book with a click of the mouse and have it delivered the instant it's released, even without owning an e-reader!) And what does this sentence mean? "[Jofron] lifted a mottled cloth from her work desk and wiped vainly at her seventeen."
Robin Hobb's continued overuse of the word "rebuke" annoyed me too, as it did in some of the previous books, and having a digital copy let me quantify the problem. 38 times in one novel is too many. There are synonyms for this word!
I might reassess in a few days when I've done some rereading and it's had a chance to soak in.
Starting the long countdown to the next book... then the next one...