![]() Well, at the beginning of City of Dragons, we’re right back in cheesy villain territory.īut that aside (and it’s a minor quibble in terms of how much of the book it actually affects), it’s a great book. This is a big part of why I feel Liveships is probably the most satisfying of her works as a story, even if she was not quite as technically proficient as in her later works, and even though it is perhaps less emotionally powerful due to the more remote and flawed characters. The one exception to this is the Liveship Traders trilogy, where the central villain is nuanced and many-hued, and even with the more simplistic secondary villain you can sort of see their warped but fundamentally benign motivations underneath. I’m not going to give away too much, but it’s fair to say that one thing I’ve always disliked with Hobb is the way she likes to create blacker-than-black villains. There are lots of reasons I’m glad I don’t live in the US, but the terrible American covers for Robin Hobb novels are surprisingly high on the list. In my opinion, City of Dragons is a substantially better book.īut a truly terrible cover. What I do have to say – and a big part of why I’m saying anything at all rather than waiting until I’ve made it through the concluding (as though anything in Hobb’s world is ever concluded!) volume – is that a lot of my concerns in the first two books were addressed here. Well, this time I’m not exactly doing that, but the plan is relatively short comments on each. Moreover, I was a bit stung last time around, ending up not writing a review for Dragon Haven, just because it was so much a continuation of Dragon Keeper that I wished I waited and written a joint review of both. There’s a limit to what you can say in book 3 of 4, let alone book 12 of (so far) 13, especially as I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible. I’m not going to say too much about this. In particular, although this is a sequel set very shortly after the end of the second novel, and continued the storylines of the main protagonists, it also feels like much more than a continuation of their story, with more POVs introduced and a significantly broader scope, in terms not only of geography and plotlines but also thematic content. So, just as the first two books are related more tightly than most books in a series, so too, in reverse, this third book is rather more loosely tied to the preceding two than would be expected. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that, just as Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are essentially two parts of a single novel, City of Dragons is (the beginning of) a sequel to that novel, rather than a book organically conceived of as the third part of a tetralogy. ![]() ![]() City of Dragons is #3 in the Rain Wild Chronicles, and #12 in the overall Realm of Elderlings cycle. ![]()
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