Assassin’s Fate

Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb
Published: 2017
Series: The Fitz and The Fool Trilogy #3
Length: 847 pages

This is the last in The Fitz and The Fool Trilogy, and from what I’ve heard, the last book to feature these two characters. It really felt like the end of an era reading this. I started the first book over fifteen years ago and have just loved this world and these characters ever since.

I started reading these before I was researching every miniscule decision I make online, and as a result, I accidentally skipped the Liveship Traders Trilogy. I just didn’t know it was in the same universe at the time. I then moved on to the Soldier Son Trilogy, a completely separate set of books, thinking I would read that and then backtrack, but I read the first two novels and just couldn’t bring myself to carry on. They were well-written, but I was just deriving no joy from them at all. I couldn’t pick up the final book, and I didn’t want to move on to another trilogy before completing that one, so I did the only logical thing possible and just stopped reading Robin Hobb altogether. Then, when this new trilogy was released, and I couldn’t help myself from picking it up, despite not having read the Liveship Traders Trilogy or The Rain Wild Chronicles yet.

It’s all very confusing, but the point is I’ve only read the Fitz novels in The Realm of the Elderlings universe, and that makes for an interesting experience. This trilogy definitely brings in characters and story elements from every trilogy, as a sort of sending off, but Hobb does it in a really smart way. I think it’s probably a great experience to read this having read everything before it, being able to revisit characters and events from the previous books, but none of the point-of-view characters in these books were involved in Liveship Traders Trilogy or The Rain Wild Chronicles, so if you haven’t read those you’re seeing everything through fresh eyes anyway. All of the characters are introduced as if new and the events are explained, so it works really well. I’m sure the ideal situation is to read them all in publication order, and if I started again I would do that, but it actually works perfectly this way as well.

There’s really no point in synopsizing the plot of a ninth (or sixteenth) book in a series (and a half, if you count the prequel), but I’ll just say I thought this ended perfectly. Anyone who’s read a few pages of a Robin Hobb book will already know that this doesn’t end with hugs and well wishes. She is known for being notoriously brutal to her characters. Some of her books can be emotionally rough to get through, but she balances the harsh scenes with the hopeful in this trilogy quite well, and that lasts right up until the end.

Some portions in the middle of this book did drag on a little too long, I thought, bogged down by some less interesting characters, and some of the plot elements felt like they depended on characters acting stupider than they seemed to be, which was, at times, frustrating to read. These actions made some sense in the context of the story, but it would be nice if these characters, especially those in their later years, could get just a bit of sense. You’d think after reading from Fitz’s point-of-view for nine books I’d be used to a bit of stupidity by now, but it’s still a surprise. I still rated this as a five star read on Goodreads, however, as I just love this series and I’m emotionally invested and it’s getting all the stars okay.

The good news with fast-tracking the series is that I still have two trilogies to read. I’ve already bought a copy of Ship of Magic. Robin Hobb has said in interviews that she’s not planning any more books in this universe, but it isn’t off the table, so there’s still hope for more Realm of the Elderlings stories. But if they don’t come, I’m still excited to see what she decides to write next.