Fool's Assassin

Title: Fool's Assassin
Author: Robin Hobb
Published: 2014!
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 630


This is it! This is why I've spent the last 6 months or so re-reading! Don't get me wrong, it was great to read Mrs. Hobb's books again, I very much enjoyed spending time with some of my favourite fantasy characters. It feels odd now to have the 'freedom' to read whatever I want. Kinda scary.

I finished Fool's Ass, as I like to call this book, last Saturday night, and have been wondering ever since what to write about without swearing profusely. FFS, Fitz, you cannot be that blind! *deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath* I'm sorry. I'm cool. I'm good. You're older and smarter, damn it, how can you not--- sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

I loved this book, I wolfed it down in large helpings. It was so nice to see Fitz with the life he had been hoping for, the one he had earned time and time again. With the woman he'd loved all his life, just... being. Happy. Not all that much smarter than he was as a teenager, obviously, but happy. It was what we rarely see in the genre: the hero after the adventures are over. Living the quiet life. It was also bitterweet to meet some of the other characters, or to hear what had happened to them. Time has passed since the last trilogy, and passed fast during this book, and not everyone could make it through.

But it's not all happy days and long winter evenings. Trouble once again comes knocking, and forces Fitz out of retirement. The final kick that gets his ass on the move is... wow. That was probably the first time in my life I had to put a book down and walk around the apartment for a while, chanting No no nono nooo no no this is not happening no n o noooooooooo no no nooo in my head. I had to pour myself a biiig glass of red wine and drink most of it before I could sit back down and read. You're a cruel lady, Mrs. Hobb. I love you for it.


   I had known that Buck had changed. Now I saw that the changes had happened all through the Six Duchies. The roads were wider than I recalled, and the lands more settled. Fields of grain grew where there had once been open pasturage. Towns sprawled along the road, so that sometimes it seemed one scarcely ended before the next began. There were more inns and towns along the way, though the size of our party sometimes overwhelmed the accomodations. The wild lands were being tamed, brought under the plow, and fenced for pasture. I wondered where the wolves hunted now. 

Fool's Fate

Title: Fool's Fate
Author: Robin Hobb
Published: 2004 by Bantam Books. Ooh, hard cover!
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 631


The last book of the Tawny Man trilogy! The Witted action is put mostly on the back seat and Buckkeep left far behind as the young prince is sent off to prove to his wife-to-be that he is worthy of her. Luckily he can bring help along, for the task set upon him is a pretty damn monumental one. So it's roadboat-trip time for Fitz, towards the frozen north and the quite worrying prophesies the Fool has made of that cold place.

Ah, I still remember buying this book, almost exactly a decade ago, coming home from Interrail. I'd been casually looking for the book wherever we stopped, if we happened to go to a bookshop, but I didn't find it until on the very last evening, in the very last stop, in Stockholm, Sweden. I didn't have a cabin or a bed for the overnight ferry ride over to Finland, so I basically spent half the night sitting in corridors and window sills, reading. By now I'd forgotten all but some big plot points, so it was like reading the whole book (and the one before, really) for the first time! And I finished just in time, for the next book is out the day after tomorrow. Yay!

(Actually, since I haven't been paying enough attention, there are like, four books after this one and before the new, outcoming one (I think they fall between these, anyway), where the story is taken back to Bingtown and the Rain Wilds. But since I don't have these books and I've already pre-ordered the new book to my Kindle-app, I'm reading that first. But it's great to know that there's more to read!)


   "So. I'll live happily ever after, as the minstrel's sing?"
   He twisted his mouth at me and shook his head. "You'll live among people who love you and have expectations of you. That will make your life horribly complicated and they will worry you sick half the time. And the other half, annoy you. And delight you." He turned away from me and took up his cup and looked into it, like a hedge-witch reading tea leaves. "Fate has given up on you, FitzChivalry Farseer. You've won. In the future that you now have found, it's almost likely that you'll live to a ripe old age, rather than that fate will try to sweep you from the playing board at every opportunity."
   I tried to lighten his words. "I was getting a bit tired of being hauled back from death's door and beyond every time I turned around."