Yuffie's Book Reviews

Assassin's Apprentice - by Robin Hobb

The Farseer series had been recommended to me by countless people, heralded as one of the greats of the fantasy genre. Boy, was it great. (See what I did there? ~_~) I haven't been this engrossed in a book, reading late into the night, for a long time.

THE PLOT

Fitz is the illegitimate child of the crown prince, though the prince didn't even know he existed. Fitz had been living with his mother and her father. But having a bastard puts Fitz's mother in eternal shame, with no one to marry her, so she'll be forever in her father's care. The book opens with the grandfather dragging 6-year-old Fitz to Buckkeep, the castle where the royal family lives, dumping Fitz there in a rage, saying he doesn't want to take care of this burden anymore. It's his father's problem now.

Unfortunately having a bastard child suddenly surface puts the crown prince Chivalry in a scandalous place and puts his wife in a very awkward position since she has been unable to bear him a child. Without ever meeting Fitz in person, Chivalry denounces his succession to the throne and moves away to a quiet life with his wife.

Now Fitz grows up there treated like absolute shit. Everyone hates him. There are only a handful of people who kind of like him and/or pity him, but they're not exactly friendly to him either. One is Chivalry's younger brother, Verity (yeah, the names, I know). But he's busy with his own life and only kind of smiles at Fitz in passing. The other is Chivalry's former right-hand-man and current stable guy, Burrich. Burrich was devastated when his master Chiv left, but Chiv's last request to him was to take care of Fitz, so Burrich, being the loyal honorable guy he is, did so.

The story doesn't have much direction, which is one major criticism. It just follows Fitz as he grows up in this life. The King has a secret bastard brother, Chade, who at the king's request, takes on Fitz as an apprentice to be an assassin (thus the book's title). But there was only one paragraph that actually outlined the things Fitz learned. That I thought was a very odd decision and one that weakened the story. It's titled Assassin's Apprentice, so I was expecting to read a story about his trials and tribulations while learning to be an assassin, however so little time was spent on actually developing that. We got a lot of mention of meetings with Chade, a lot of conversation with him, but very little on actual training. And then there weren't actually that many missions of assassinations, and the few covered were glossed over in a summary paragraph or two. The climax of the book covered a very big mission in detail, but the rest of the book up to that point really didn't revolve around Fitz being apprenticed to an assassin.

This book is huge, though, and there were many other things he faced. The magicy thing here is called the Skill, kind of like telepathy and being able to influence another's thoughts. The Skillmaster, Galen, was a douche of highest proportions and despised Fitz, severely abusing him and setting him up for failure. That was a really interesting part of the book because of how much ire boiled in my blood. Galen was truly despicable and hypocritical, a pathetic man and a villain you just love to hate. And everyone loves the underdog fighting against the evil teacher trope.

There were a lot of little subplots going on, with Fitz being able to use the counterpart of the Skill, the Wit, to talk to animals, but Burrich finds out and thrashes him, killing his puppy before Fitz gets lost to the Wit and turns into a madman. That happened early on and put a huge strain on their relationship moving forward. Then Chivalry unexpectedly died (er... murdered. probably). It was interesting to see Fitz learn about his father through the stories of other people. Sometimes I think it was laid on too thick how chivalrous and wonderful a guy Chiv was, though occasionally a fault poked through. It did get a bit tiring how often people said "looks just like his father! has his father's eyes! You are just like your father!"

My complaint is that there wasn't a goal for the story until the very end where Regal, the third prince brother, did his evil scheme to try taking over the throne. Each subplot had a goal and really kept me turning pages because of how interesting they were, but there was no real thread connecting them. They were just a string of events that happened.