Hey Robert,

You know me I love audio books. I read/listened to this over a week long sales trip.

Title: Assasin’s Apprentice
Series: Farseer Trilogy; Book 1
Author: Robin Hobb
Genre: Fantasy
Audience: Adult
ROTS Setting: UU,
Synopsis: This is the story of a young bastard of the heir prince. The story of his life at Buck Keep from about 6 years old to 16, his teachers and tutors.
Recommendation: Teen would probably like this. But there really isn’t any harsh content. Although B**** is used quite a bit but in its meaning of female dog. As usual, I really enjoy this book. I really enjoy almost all books and stories. I think I really just like the act of reading and listening to stories. But this is considered to be a great series and almost even a classic.

One of the really wonderful things about Assassin’s Apprentice is the characters. The Bastard feels real and changes from boy to teen developing in his observations, rational, and motivations. Even the support characters like Burrich, Prince Verity, Prince Regal, King Shrewd, Chade, Nosy, and others. They feel like real and complex characters, their motives are not simply one-dimensional or easy to understand.

I also really enjoyed the setting. The world of the Six Duchies feels like an authentic enough medieval society. The trick is that the Bastard doesn’t observe some things, he is a somewhat unreliable narrator. So we get a lot of detail about some things but almost none about others. And it is true that the devil is in the details. So by saying less the author has made the world feel more real.

The plot though is where I get less impressed. The story is basically the narration of an old man remembering and writing about his childhood. So some things he just doesn’t remember. He tells the story from a far off future and then quickly changes back into first person perspective. I found all that quite irritating. Back to the plot. To me, there just doesn’t seem to be much of a point to the story. Honestly how interesting is it to follow the Bastard around his daily tasks? Yeah, he is learning and learning and then does something new and then learning. He is too young and stupid to really get into the court intrigue. There are some catastrophic things happening in the kingdom, but he can’t and isn’t doing anything about it. It gets more exciting later on in the book but it still is just kind of whatever. Looking at the plot I don’t understand why I even enjoyed this book? Maybe I didn’t.

Let me know what you think about the plot was it just way too clever for me to enjoy or was it just bland? I do understand that there are two more books in this series and they will hopefully be quite a bit more exciting.

Jared

Links

• Robin Hobb’s Official Site