Part 3 of the Rain Wild Chronicles contained an overwhelming number of different storylines. In this book, it was nice to see them all converge, almost all characters coming together into one place. There was also more excitement and action in this part of the series, and it was altogether a very enjoyable reading experience.Although this concerns the series as a whole, not so much "Blood of Dragons", I find that Hobb wrote a little bit too much from Hest's and the Duke of Chalced's point of view. It's an interesting challenge to convincingly picture the world view of a thoroughly bad character, but as a reader, I couldn't get into those parts of the book - rather, I spent those times disbelieving that someone could really think this way. But maybe it is realistic, since there exist rather bad people in the real world as well...It was also interesting to see how a previously very positive character Rapskal (who remained on the "good" side until the end) became more and more foreign, incomprehensible and even unpleasant (this, as well, started already in the 3rd book). From my reading experience, there are more examples of the other way around. Anyway, this is one of the examples of Hobb's strongest skill, character development - I think almost all of the characters changed throughout the series, some even quite drastically.In my opinion, the weakest part of this book was the ending. About 30-40 pages before the end, I discovered the small amount of pages left and was starting to think that this will end in a cliffhanger, since there were so many loose ends left... But no, at least according to Hobb's home page, this should be the last part of the Rain Wild Chronicles, and somehow, the author managed to wrap everything up. Still, the ending was rather sudden and many questions were left unanswered - I could easily have seen at least 100-200 pages more of this story (I'd have liked to see the rediscovery of Elderling magic, things ended very quickly and far too easily in Chalced, etc). We'll see, maybe Hobb is planning to return to this world - maybe the next series will take place in Chalced?Despite the couple of details which I think could have been done better, I cannot give this book less than 4 stars - it's probably even worth 4,5. Definitely recommended to fans of Robin Hobb and other readers of epic fantasy (especially those who prefer character development to lots of action).This review has also been published in the blog http://hirveloss.blogspot.com/ in Estonian.
maarjao
Part 3 of the Rain Wild Chronicles contained an overwhelming number of different storylines. In this book, it was nice to see them all converge, almost all characters coming together into one place. There was also more excitement and action in this part of the series, and it was altogether a very enjoyable reading experience.Although this concerns the series as a whole, not so much "Blood of Dragons", I find that Hobb wrote a little bit too much from Hest's and the Duke of Chalced's point of view. It's an interesting challenge to convincingly picture the world view of a thoroughly bad character, but as a reader, I couldn't get into those parts of the book - rather, I spent those times disbelieving that someone could really think this way. But maybe it is realistic, since there exist rather bad people in the real world as well...It was also interesting to see how a previously very positive character Rapskal (who remained on the "good" side until the end) became more and more foreign, incomprehensible and even unpleasant (this, as well, started already in the 3rd book). From my reading experience, there are more examples of the other way around. Anyway, this is one of the examples of Hobb's strongest skill, character development - I think almost all of the characters changed throughout the series, some even quite drastically.In my opinion, the weakest part of this book was the ending. About 30-40 pages before the end, I discovered the small amount of pages left and was starting to think that this will end in a cliffhanger, since there were so many loose ends left... But no, at least according to Hobb's home page, this should be the last part of the Rain Wild Chronicles, and somehow, the author managed to wrap everything up. Still, the ending was rather sudden and many questions were left unanswered - I could easily have seen at least 100-200 pages more of this story (I'd have liked to see the rediscovery of Elderling magic, things ended very quickly and far too easily in Chalced, etc). We'll see, maybe Hobb is planning to return to this world - maybe the next series will take place in Chalced?Despite the couple of details which I think could have been done better, I cannot give this book less than 4 stars - it's probably even worth 4,5. Definitely recommended to fans of Robin Hobb and other readers of epic fantasy (especially those who prefer character development to lots of action).This review has also been published in the blog http://hirveloss.blogspot.com/ in Estonian.
