Review: Assassin's Fate

Title: Assassin's Fate
Author: Robin Hobb
Genre: Fantasy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Goodreads Summary:More than twenty years ago, the first epic fantasy novel featuring FitzChivalry Farseer and his mysterious, often maddening friend the Fool struck like a bolt of brilliant lightning. Now New York Times bestselling author Robin Hobb brings to a momentous close the third trilogy featuring these beloved characters in a novel of unsurpassed artistry that is sure to endure as one of the great masterworks of the genre.
Fitz’s young daughter, Bee, has been kidnapped by the Servants, a secret society whose members not only dream of possible futures but use their prophecies to add to their wealth and influence. Bee plays a crucial part in these dreams—but just what part remains uncertain.
As Bee is dragged by her sadistic captors across half the world, Fitz and the Fool, believing her dead, embark on a mission of revenge that will take them to the distant island where the Servants reside—a place the Fool once called home and later called prison. It was a hell the Fool escaped, maimed and blinded, swearing never to return.
For all his injuries, however, the Fool is not as helpless as he seems. He is a dreamer too, able to shape the future. And though Fitz is no longer the peerless assassin of his youth, he remains a man to be reckoned with—deadly with blades and poison, and adept in Farseer magic. And their goal is simple: to make sure not a single Servant survives their scourge.

oh the emotional payoff of watching characters grow over 50+ years...

I loved this book so, so much! Robin Hobb is a master character writer. After all, she made me go from hating Malta's guts (reading about her made me cringe more than nails scraping on chalkboard) to respecting and even loving her by the end of the Liveship trilogy. If that's the sort of character development Robin Hobb can create in 3 books, imagine how much her characters can evolve over multiple trilogies! Full disclosure, I haven't read all of the Elderling trilogies/quartets, but I have read 3 of the 5, including the original trilogy about Fitz as a child.

I am going to be very brief with this review, because I do not want to spoil a single thing. I will just say that this book is very rich and ties together the events of nearly all the series before it. Many beloved characters make appearances (no pun intended), and it's so interesting to see how they interact with one another. I especially loved the interactions between Fitz and a certain ship. I have to admit that for the first half of the book, I found Bee's chapters kind of tiresome and difficult to get through. That all changed in the second half of the book; true to form, the final few hundred pages of the trilogy were action-packed and the characters had to make devastating choices.

Bee grew up quite a bit in this book, and looking back at the first book of this trilogy it's amazing to see how far she has come and how she has endured so much. The same can be said of Fitz, and the Fool. Their relationship is the focal point of this series, and I sobbed at the end of this book. It was an absolutely perfect ending, and as much as I would love to read more books about their relationship, I think this book's perfect ending would be ruined if there were any more. That isn't to say I don't want more Elderling books. I would love to see how things are coming along for Bee as she grows up, or to see what the kingdoms are like after a generation or two.

No one makes me feel as wide a range of emotions while reading as Robin Hobb. This book had me all over the place, from laughter and fond nostalgia to disgust and rage. This is a series I will probably come back to over the next few years, if not the next decades. No one else writes quite like Robin Hobb, and I am so glad there are so many of her books to enjoy!

A free e-ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review