Assassin's Quest

This review is mainly for Assassin's Quest, but also for the Farseer Trilogy as a whole. My final thoughts revolve around how Robin Hobb lets me live out a lot of my guilty pleasures in fantasy literature without guilt. In this book she continues tropes like talking with animals, badass sword-wielding heroines, spiteful pretenders to the throne, and then she adds dragons. Maybe it's because this is a 90s series and makes me very nostalgic for the fantasy lit. of my teenage years, but I kinda dug the world despite cliches.

I think I also enjoyed it because it's not an entire cliche. General spoilers, so locking just in case. One of the best surprises for me was Fitz' relationship with Molly. I have to say that for most of the second book and every time he mentioned Molly in this book, I groaned. It's not that she's an awful character, but she always pulled me out of the story and back into Fitz adolescent romance. Adolescent romance is my least favorite thing to read ever. Give me a phone book; it's more interesting. I like that Hobb recognized it as an adolescent romance, something Fitz had to go through and from which he would mature. They get their happy endings, but not with each other. Fitz doesn't even get a stand-in for Molly (I wouldn't count Starling). He just has to grow up and move on. Not enough fantasy books show that this is often what people (especially teenagers) have to do.Hobb writes animals like nobody's business, and Nighteyes' growth into partly human is more interesting to me than Fitz' wolfish natures. I like the slow transformation, the fact that Nighteyes grows to realize he wants a pack and won't have one among wolves, so he builds one among humans. It's slow and subtle and easily the factor that sets this book apart from all those fantasy tropes. The Fool was a character I grew to love quite a bit more in this book. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed him before, but I enjoyed him in the way all fan favorites are enjoyed. There's no question people will like him; he gets to be the sardonic tongue making fun of the story in the background. This book gives him background of his own, and while I found the White Prophet backstory a little flimsy, his relationship with Fitz more than makes up for it. The Fool gets to be genuine in this book, and it turns out unique and beautiful.Chade, whom I loved for many of the reasons I love the Fool, also gets to be a bit more genuine. I loved seeing him in his prime, and I wished he was present for more of the book. The other characters don't engage me as much. In the second book, I was about done with Fitz. He's more palatable in this one, particularly in the beginning where he's learning to be human again. However, he still gets all Molly, Molly, Molly too much for my taste and too often makes such stupid decisions. He's a believable character, but one I want to smack down nonetheless. Kettricken and Verity are also similarly believable if disappointing. It saddened me to see two of my favorites so weakened, and Verity is used as an emergency save a bit too often. I like Kettricken's steel spine, but I would've liked to see her take more action other than "Gotta find Verity." I wanted to follow her dragon story past the ending. That is my Kettricken.The new characters didn't move me too much. Starling is a bit irritating and Kettle was clearly marked for death from the moment she came on stage, so I don't have much to say about them. Regal remains too simple a villain for my taste.That said: This ending rocked. Very spoilery from here.Hobb gave me all the clues to her ending, but I didn't pick up on a single one of them. Skill-imprinting is such a basic tenant of all the books, but I never expected Fitz to be able to use it. Imprinting Regal to be a fanatical Farseer loyalist is absolute brilliance. I'd also totally forgotten about the little ferret from Blue Lake. What a fantastic comeuppance. My hat off to you, Ms. Hobb.I also enjoyed the Forging reveal. While it's a little bit abracadabra, the idea that Forging is an accidental side-effect of dragon exposure which destroyed a people totally unintentionally is a unique angle. I still think maybe the Redships would have pointed out this was a revenge mission, but then again their perspective is one where sense doesn't factor in. I still don't understand Forging all that well, but the how isn't as important as the why in this case.

So final thought-wise, this book isn't for everyone, but it mostly worked for me. You have to have a taste for fantasy tropes and a willingness to deal with a teenage (he might be older now, but he still talks like one) first-person narrator. If neither of those things bothers you, there is a lot to be said for the characters, story-telling, and world building here. It'll probably take me a while to get to the next trilogy in this universe, but it's definitely on my to read list now.