City of Lies

I quit 10% in and I will tell you all why.

First of all, I did not start to read this because of Robin Hobb. She seems nice and all, her books are just incredibly depressing and when a series makes my life quality worse there is no way for me to justify reading it. Again, it's not about her as a person. I really wanted to like her stuff, for a time I even kept telling my then-flatmate that my book was “going great” and “it was interesting” and “I'm sure it's just about to pick up”. It was so bland and depressing.
So yeah, my decision to pick this up was based on the little blurb and NOT because of expectations caused by loving Hobb. With that out of the way... I'm going to rant now. (Do I have to point out that I have no issues with the author? I don't know ANYTHING about her. Nothing.)

I can't stand a lot of the new fantasy being published nowadays. I'm not saying they have no place and they shouldn't exist, but I want to avoid them all like the plague. So what is my issue? The goal. The goal of the author totally misses the goal of me reading these books. What I'm looking for is some kind of an adventure, something fun that draws me in. What the author is trying to do is turning fantasy into something that takes itself too seriously, it tries to be too poetic and yes, even pretentious. The fun and enjoyment is lost by trying to be too deep, the movement and exploration is lost when it's all an exercise in writing something they believe will be “taken seriously”. The balance of well-written stories and characters and the spark of it being an enjoyable read is completely lost.
Exactly that happened here. Before anyone says “but people died here”, I don't mean constant fun times, just... I guess if I could exactly explain I would be writing it, eh? Some sense of wonder.

What we got instead was just a lot of fantasy language. It's too much, with too little context to really get a picture of it all. The frame of reference is pretty much “see? The world is rich and you will probably, maybe get it later or something”. To me that's pretty much just a shortcut to world building and I don't like it. It needs to be portioned out a bit, I won't just buy it because of sombre prose.
The characters were the same as well. Two siblings who sound exactly the same as POV characters. What the frick is the use of having them if there is nothing specific about either? They both sound boring and serious. When the book is in first person I need to buy the emotions of the character and none of that happens here, they both clinically describe being sad.

And one more thing. When a book takes its time to deliver one more preachy monologue of “but the women are all so oppressed, but here we are so open minded and in tune with 2018” instead of actually pulling me in... it's stupid. It's also such a cliche now, it's a miracle if we don't get one in every single bloody book. Fuck subtlety, just tell me I should be congratulated for living with a vagina.

So yeah, I don't like it, I will read something else instead.

Have a good evening and pick your poison!