Friday Reads: Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb

All right, so Friday has rolled along and between reading Hounded by Kevin Hearne (which I’ll maybe do a post about next week) and NaNoWriMo, I’ve only gotten around 200 pages into Fool’s Fate, so this won’t be a proper review of that book. What it will be is a blog post about the series as a whole. Because I love it. And because it deserves at least one post about why.

Robin Hobb has made a name for herself as a fantasy author unafraid of putting her characters through hell. That’s nothing, you might say; you’ve read Game of Thrones, you might even say, but that doesn’t begin to compare. Not even a little bit. What I find to be so heart wrenching about the Farseer Trilogy (and the follow-up, The Tawny Man trilogy) is that the melancholy and sadness feels very personal. Its not about the characters you love dying, it’s about growing to love characters who are inherently flawed and often build walls in the way of their own happiness.

While sometimes Hobb’s books can lean heavily towards characters and internal conflict at the expense of pacing and plot that’s the backbone of most fantasy novels, I think it more than makes up with it by presenting what has to be some of the best characters in the genre. It’s been incredible getting to see the characters grow from the first book into the sixth, where they don’t seem to just be taller, grumpier, and older versions of themselves, but actual adults who carry the weight and their history and the emotional scars with them.

Fool’s Fate has been one of those books I’ve dreaded reading. It’s the last book in the journey of Fitz and the Fool (for now, at least) and I just don’t want it to end. And I’m worried about where it will end, given Hobb’s willingness to let her characters meet with unhappy endings. The right ending isn’t always the happy one, after all.