Mar-12-2010, 01:44 PM (UTC)
I loved the book, even the predictable parts like Heeby's return. 
I now count Thymara as one of my favourite characters ever - I'm so happy she kept her head cool and did things her own way, even at the very end. And I loved Sedric/Carson as much as I loved Althea/Brashen when I first read the LST.
I wonder how much of the predictability is because we've read the previous books in the series? It was easy to guess from the beginning that Kelsingra was the same city we had seen before in the first trilogy. But that is not clear for those who have started reading Hobb's books from the Rain Wild Chronicles (and I've been surprised to hear that there are many people who have done so). For them it was always a mystery what waited at the end of the journey. For old readers it was more of a question of who will survive and how they will change along the way.
On a related note: it was interesting to see how the Bingtown folk were described by these characters as... well, not quite evil, but as a force that controlled and limited them and were even somewhat of an adversary. Well, at the end we see that the two sides, the "outcasts" and the "civilized" people will still have to find a way to deal with each other from time to time but it put an interesting spin to things because previously we've thought that the Traders are doing things right. This seems to be a theme that is repeated in Hobb's books: every culture/nation sees the others as "barbaric" or otherwise "wrong" and the Hobb shifts the viewpoint in another book and we find out that the Outislanders are not savages after all or that the Bingtown folk consider the Six Duchies to be quite primitive. I hope we'll get to see a proper Chalcedean point of view one day - there were interesting glimpses of that world in this story!
I now count Thymara as one of my favourite characters ever - I'm so happy she kept her head cool and did things her own way, even at the very end. And I loved Sedric/Carson as much as I loved Althea/Brashen when I first read the LST. I wonder how much of the predictability is because we've read the previous books in the series? It was easy to guess from the beginning that Kelsingra was the same city we had seen before in the first trilogy. But that is not clear for those who have started reading Hobb's books from the Rain Wild Chronicles (and I've been surprised to hear that there are many people who have done so). For them it was always a mystery what waited at the end of the journey. For old readers it was more of a question of who will survive and how they will change along the way.
On a related note: it was interesting to see how the Bingtown folk were described by these characters as... well, not quite evil, but as a force that controlled and limited them and were even somewhat of an adversary. Well, at the end we see that the two sides, the "outcasts" and the "civilized" people will still have to find a way to deal with each other from time to time but it put an interesting spin to things because previously we've thought that the Traders are doing things right. This seems to be a theme that is repeated in Hobb's books: every culture/nation sees the others as "barbaric" or otherwise "wrong" and the Hobb shifts the viewpoint in another book and we find out that the Outislanders are not savages after all or that the Bingtown folk consider the Six Duchies to be quite primitive. I hope we'll get to see a proper Chalcedean point of view one day - there were interesting glimpses of that world in this story!
"Green nubs on the dry sticks of the clematis promised that the appearance of death was not death itself." - Ship of Destiny
Facebook
Google
Reddit
Twitter
Blogger
Tumblr
Pinterest