John

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John is Currently Reading

John is currently reading

Fool's Quest (The Fitz and The Fool, #2)

by Robin Hobb (欧宝娱乐 Author)

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Reading for the 3rd time

read in June 2017

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John said: " Review from first read in 2017:
Once again, I find myself too busy to write up a proper review--blame it on gainful employment or blame it on three young children, regardless, it's amazing that I can finish a book, never mind a review. But I do want Review from first read in 2017:
Once again, I find myself too busy to write up a proper review--blame it on gainful employment or blame it on three young children, regardless, it's amazing that I can finish a book, never mind a review. But I do want to get some thoughts down. It'll be full of spoilers, because I'm just thinking out loud here.

(view spoiler)[The end of the first book revealed to us that all was not well in Withywoods after Fitz left, as Dwalia and her folk and her Chalcedeans came in killing people, destroying things, and abducting Bee and Shun. So we know this already when the book starts, but Fitz doesn't, which makes the opening several chapters of Fool's Quest a kind of delicious torture. Because basically, things go so right for Fitz here. I mean, despite inadvertently taking a huge risk with Riddle's life, he's fine; the Fool is getting better; and most significantly, Fitz is pulled out of the shadows and given the recognition and honor that he's deserved for so long. But this sweet turn of events is poisoned for the reader because we're just waiting in suspense for the drop of the blade that we know is hanging over Fitz.

And, of course, it does drop. Even then, we don't get non-stop action. This isn't that kind of book. It's faster paced and with higher stakes than the first book, but one thing Hobb does awfully well is to slow things down without slowing them down too much. She's a good writer, she holds your interest without high drama or battle scenes.

One of the themes of the novel, I suppose, is the way that so many characters have aged and changed. Fitz isn't what he used to be, though his heart is ever the same. He can't go charging off to fight the way he could when he was younger (even though that still doesn't always stop him). Chade's health and mind are fading fast. The Fool is broken and even the Skill can't restore him. Dutiful has grown from the brash young prince into a capable king (who, we are frequently reminded, has a lot more on his mind than the things that motivate Fitz).

On the other side of the ledger, we have a lot of characters who fall under the umbrella of "kids these days!" Lant, Per, Ash, Shun (eventually): Fitz can neither quite rely on any of them, nor will he take their education on himself to get them up to snuff. He's caught up in his own problems--one of which is, of course, that he did an inadequate job of raising and protecting Bee--and can't or won't devote any time to these youngsters. He's had good mentors, but Fitz doesn't want to be a good mentor.

Hobb tricked me a bit there when she brought in Fleeter--I thought she was going to bring in a new Wit companion for Fitz. Or maybe even the crow. But no: Fitz is Fitz, he can't find peace with anything he's lost and form new relationships. I guess that's fundamentally the part of his character that keeps him from mentoring anyone: he's bound tightly to the past by his regrets and never did really internalize Nighteyes鈥� directives about living in the moment.

Speaking of Nighteyes, I wonder if we鈥檒l ever get clarification about the nature of Wolf-Father鈥檚 presence in Bee鈥檚 mind?

I appreciated at the end the way she finally brought the two halves of this world (The Six Duchies and the Rainwild/Kelsingra stories) together (particularly since I just read The Rainwild Chronicles this spring). When characters are protagonists in the story, we live with them in a different way, and I love the effect of seeing them afresh through the eyes of someone else, in this case another beloved protagonist. (hide spoiler)] ...more "

Jun 06, 2021 02:01PM · see review

John is currently reading

Fool's Assassin (The Fitz and the Fool, #1)

by Robin Hobb (欧宝娱乐 Author)

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Reading for the 3rd time

read in June 2017

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John said: " 2021 review, second reading:
I had a couple audiobooks that I wanted, but there's a wait for both from the library, and I was feeling a strong desire to have some novel to listen to. Maybe I should spend more time in my own head and less in audiobooks 2021 review, second reading:
I had a couple audiobooks that I wanted, but there's a wait for both from the library, and I was feeling a strong desire to have some novel to listen to. Maybe I should spend more time in my own head and less in audiobooks and podcasts, but here we are. I decided to re-read something, and settled on returning to Fitz and the Fool.

I can't honestly call any book or any author my "favorite" at this point. There's just too many good writers and too many good books to say that one or another is the pinacle. But if I put all the fantasy authors I've read into tiers, Hobb would be in my top tier. At least, the nine books that follow Fitz would be (all of her other works have been enjoyable, but they don't strike me so deeply as these few thousand pages do).

Hobb's writing is not everyone's thing. The plotting is often slow, and that's very true of this volume. The first six books were all first-person narrations by Fitz himself, and the style is a kind of reflective memoir that feels like a throwback to an earlier time. It's deliberate, it's detailed, and no doubt some find it dull, but I find something so compelling about the characters that she's created, their depth and verisimilitude. The ways they relate to one another, the ways that they try and fail and sometimes succeed to understand one another, the way that most every relationship and feeling between people is complicated in some subtle way is just glorious. And yet that subtle complexity is not, itself, strained or overdone, it's just a facet of the story, and one that rarely fails to touch me deeply. Many of these relationships go back over the six previous books, which is part of their depth, but I found myself holding back tears at times while I read this, even for the second time. The other thing about all this is that Hobb is absolutely relentless in hardships she inflicts on her characters, in a way that few other authors manage. She deftly cloaks a very gritty, grim world behind polished, measured narration and courtly manners in impressive fashion. But this is a world where good people die, where torture happens, where casual cruelty lives even in the midst of decent folks, and yet also a world of courage and sacrifice, of love and loyalty.

(view spoiler)[In 2020, I became aware that my mother was suffering from the early stages of dementia, and she lived with us for 9 months. This experience made Fitz's relationship to his wife, Molly, all the more poignant. Even though it turns out that she is NOT deluded about her pregnancy, I could relate more in this re-read to the feeling of dealing with someone who appears not to be completely in touch with reality, and how thin the line seems to be in such a person, who can seem to be in tune with what we might call "consensus reality" for long stretches of time and then with the same certainty asserting things that can't possibly be true. And it's hard to know how to deal with that. Play along? Dispute? And how much can we trust their judgment in anything? Plus that sense of losing the person, of seeing them decline before your eyes. It all struck me poignantly. For that matter, as I'm further along in my parenting journey, those elements no doubt hit me differently this time around as well. We never read the same book twice, I suppose.

Compared to the first time I read the novel, it seemed--on the one hand--even more obvious that Fitz should be able to put some of the clues together better, and on the other hand I was more aware of the way that he is pulled in so many different directions by all the forces pulling on him, perhaps especially the prosaic daily concerns of running a house--especially have he loses Molly and begins discovering just exactly what--and how much--she has been doing all these years. Like Fitz, I see a multitude of projects that I keep meaning to get to that I never quite have the time for until they simply can't be put off any longer, and it only takes a weekend with my wife out of town to realize how buried either of us would be without all the things large and small that the other handles routinely. Pile onto that the concerns that keep getting added to Fitz's plate, and it's fair to say he's overwhelmed. Often in fantasy fiction, what we have is some problem that is so overwhelming that it simply must be attended to. The world is at war, the dark lord must be fought, the world must be saved, our heroes are on the run, whatever. One overwhelming priority rises to the forefront and our hero(es) rise to meet it. Fitz lives in a world much more like our own in this sense, where there are so many very important things going on that it's hard to even see the great evil (though, over the course of the novel it IS taking shape). Fitz is dealing with grief, he's trying to sort things out with his daughter, and his other daughter, and there's the day to day work he's doing and the day to day work he's avoiding, and the day to day work that he's barely conscious of, and now there's a spoiled brat to protect and try to do right by, and then another, and there's really just not enough time in the day to sort out this prophesy business, even though he IS trying. Poor guy. It's easy to arm-chair fantasy hero this, but upon more sober reflection, I'm willing to say Fitz is doing the best he can, and probably better than I would be.

But anyway, my point here--such as it is--is that I love this novel even more the second time, three years later, and I'm just going to have to re-read (listen to) the whole trilogy again, even if the library tells me the other books I requested have come in.
(hide spoiler)]

2017 Review:
Well phooey. I wrote a review and it didn't save. Even that review was a bit rushed since I'm on vacation and just trying to get something down before too much time passes and what I remember of it is superseded by the fact that I'm already reading the second book.

First, this should not be the first Robin Hobb book that anyone reads. On the one hand, there's the fact that the main character(s) here have six huge novels of backstory before this volume, not to mention seven more books that fill out this world. On the other hand, I think this book benefits greatly from trusting the author. The writing here is beautiful, masterful, but the pace of the story is, frankly, more than a little slow. It's like a 500-page prologue that only ramps up in the final chapters (and appears poised to really get going in volumes two and three). However, having already been brought to tears by earlier volumes of Fitz's story, I can both appreciate the more mundane details in the context of Fitz's life and also trust that Hobb will bring it all together powerfully.

I'll just throw some more random thoughts under a spoiler tag:

(view spoiler)

I feel like there was more that I said in my first draft, but I can't recall what and I can't wait for my memory or this will never get posted. ...more "

May 31, 2021 02:12PM · see review