The Complete Farseer Trilogy

I really really struggled with the second book in this trilogy and there are only two reasons I even picked up the third one.

1. I already owned it. The whole trilogy came to my Kindle in a sort of omnibus-y deal.
2. I've already attempted to get through this trilogy once before, and I'm so not going to be giving it up at the same place a second time. Even if I'm not going to finish, I'll get a little farther.

So I pressed on. I have to admit that in spite of a very shaky start, the book has started to catch my interest a bit as I reached the middle. Which is probably the most interest I've managed to muster at all through this. One of the problems I had with the second book was that it was a very long and nothing really happened. Stuff happened to Fitz, but he never really participated much in anything. It's not until now that I finally understand why the story is written in this way, because Fitz is the catalyst. He causes stuff to happen more or less simply by existing, and that's why it's always going on around him until the villain of the piece decides finally to kill him.

So they killed him. This accounts for the shaky start with the third book. Due to the way the second book ended, the start of this one seemed really very slow as Fitz is retrained as a human. And then they row and he reverts to wolfhood and then try to be human and revert and it seemed very much like more of the same repetitive and excessive detail about very little. And during all this, the entire premise is completely changed and characters that were well known and important to Fitz are excised cleanly from the narrative. They get a mention here and there, but otherwise they might not even exist. And I get why, but it just totally felt like a completely different story, possibly because it seemed a very sudden change.

But eventually Fitz decided he wanted to be a person and further decided to kill Regal and so set off on a quest to do that. Cue much mental groaning at that point, because it strikes me as pretty much the stupidest thing to do when Regal believes him to be dead already. And he knows the right thing to do is try and find Verity, so if he had just toodled quietly off to do that and killed Regal afterwards, he probably wouldn't have had half Regal's soldiers on his heels the whole way and got caught more times than I can conveniently count. Of course, it would also help a lot if the journey had been made with a little bit of discretion. Oh, he tries, but at the same time he might as well have written 'I'm FitzChivalry and I aten't ded!' on his forehead. What good is an assumed name if you're flaunting a unique and well-known earring and attempting to pass a wolf off as a dog at the same time? And then he's surprised when people figure it out? Seriously???

Around the halfway point of the book, though, I actually became interested in finishing the story, so I have to admit that the trilogy as such redeemed itself somewhat as we started to get some answers and as the characters started being... maybe not actually proactive, but least not passively reacting. I even think I might pick up the next trilogy in this verse as well, knowing full well that I'm likely going to find reading them the same struggle as this one. I don't know, perhaps that's just a style issue that I might get used to?

Great, although not as good as Royal Assassin. I still read it unreasonably quickly considering it was 700 pages.

The plot was weirdly meandering - the first part of the book is fantastic and driven, but it suddenly shifts gears and becomes almost a different book. The pacing is just awkward starting about a quarter of the way through and never really improves.

The "quest" part drags - it's hard to stay invested in the post-Skill Road part of the book. I still enjoyed that portion for its emotional resonance, but it was a long way to get there. Although the threat of the coterie never goes away, it generally becomes less frightening. I also didn't love the development of Regal: in RA he managed to be smart and conniving rather than strictly powerful and I may have preferred that.

RA had this great feeling of sinking, a mounting dread knowing everything had to collapse eventually, but that same feeling wasn't present in AQ.