Robin Hobb, City of Dragons (Harper, 2012)

Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.

The good news: for the first time, Robin Hobb will be writing a series longer than a trilogy; given the ending(s) of City of Dragons (there are three different threads as the book ends), there's no way there can't be a Rain Wilds Chronicles #4. The bad news is that you may want to hold off until the (AFAIK) as-yet-untitled fourth Rain Wilds Chronicles book comes out to read this one; holy cliffhangers, Bookman!

We pick up where Dragon Haven left off (and, necessarily, this part will contain SPOILERS for the first two books in the series, so be warned). The dragons and the keepers, plus Alise and Sedric, have made it to Kelsingra. Well, almost; they're stuck on the right bank of the river, while Kelsongra is on the left. Not a problem, except that the river is of fast-flowing acid, it's huge (I'm not sure why I have this in my head, but I'm thinking two miles wide, maybe more), and with the exception of Heeby, none of the dragons can do more than hop as far as flying is concerned. That's not going to get anyone to Kelsingra—not the dragons, not the keepers, not the Elderling scholar. And all of them need to be there for different reasons. Worse, supplies are running out, which means Leftrin and Tarman are eventually going to have to go back to Cassarick, at which time world will leak out that a new Eldering city has been found...and the treasure hunters will descend like vultures.

Now, you've read Robin Hobb before (and if you haven't, go back to Assassin's Apprentice and start from the beginning; the Rain Wilds Chronicles is technically the fourth series in a larger series containing the Farseer, Liveship, and Tawny Man trilogies before it), you know what to expect here. I do have to mention that in my review of one of the Solider Son books, I mentioned that it was one of my greatest fantasies for Robin Hobb to write a hero who actually considers the consequences of his or her actions before acting; I think we have that here in Alise Finbok (with her soon-to-be-ex huband Hest as the impulsive guy who would have been the main focus of Hobb's other books, given how badly things keep going for him every time he makes a decision), but Hobb has gone the other way, and while Alise is not one of the main characters of this book, she still has more than enough screen time to show how considering the outcome can still lead to misery if one jumps to the wrong conclusions. We haven't gotten the full repercussions of some of that; we'll have to wait for book four. That's only one of the many questions left unanswered at the end of this, the shortest of Hobb's novels to date; I can only hope its brevity, and the time between the second and third Rain Wilds books, means that #4 will be on its way anon. I can't wait to find out what happens next. ****