It feels a lot like a caribbean trading story, including pirates, slaves, and sailors and all that go with the lifestyle, plus some magic. They’re just in a different part of the world doing different things than the OG series.
There’s only one or two named places that are the same where the worlds meet. While this is the same world as Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, as I mentioned above it’s really not the same at all. But by around page 100 it was all good and everyone was working together (or more likely not) in more or less all the scenes. This does NOT make it a bad story, but it is an uphill climb for the first while. This book starts with one new character after another, for nearly 100 pages, with little in the way of explanation on how they fit together (or if they don’t). I LOVE epic fantasy, but jumping into a new series takes some work. Also of note is that this is Epic fantasy, with quite a large scope and character list. I’ve gotten a little out of the habit of reading those and so it took me a bit longer than normal to get into this story. But it does also have more than usual for today’s standards of the ‘infodump’. So it has some great action scenes, and fantastic characterization, and the setting is so well done I feel like I’m there. And now to the review!īeing written in the late ‘90’s, this book straddles the ‘old style’ of writing fantasy with the newer and usually more fast-paced writing. And yes, it was the perfect book for that purpose. Then late last year I read the back and noticed… Hey! These aren’t going to be so cold, it’s a totally different (and warmer) part of the world! Which makes them great winter reads, to keep my mind warm while it’s snowing outside. So I put it off and then put it off some more, then moved and continued to put them off.
In fact, it was so easy to imagine that I didn’t want to jump straight into the next trilogy because I was so darn cold the whole time I was reading. In fact, I read one of them while we were in Helsinki, Finland and it was so easy there to imagine the cold and inhospitable setting. I read the first Hobb trilogy, the Farseer books, in 2016 while on vacation and they were fabulous. Okay, not literally forever but about 8 years ago I wrote down a list of all the book series I needed to read but hadn’t yet and this (as in the entirety of Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings, not just Ship of Magic or the Liveship Traders trilogy) was on it. This is one of the books that I’ve been meaning to read for what feels like forever.
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