*spoilers all books* Dragon Haven, Enjoy it? Hate it?

[Albertosaurus Rex]

I really liked The Rain Wilds Chronicles, although I do have to admit that I missed the more epic sweep of earlier novels.

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.

How on Earth did I ever miss that? :blink: In my mind, the Rain Wilds were much farther to the south, so I thought they couldn't be the same city. (Sure, I did get the references to the river of silver, but I just assumed that there were more of them.) It still took some looking the map to piece everything togeher after what you just said.

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 noticed that theme too and I really like it. And I would kill to read a story from the Chalcedean point of view.