A review by evybird
Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
3.0
Well.... I finished.
I would like to come back and write down more thoughts later, but for now my main thought is.... this is the most boring long book I have ever managed to actually finish.
I really don't get all the glowing praise.... like.... at all.... how were all those people not bored? This book feels like a 35-hour prologue. There is no direction.
Usually books move... towards... something... there's some kind of.... thing pushing the action along.... you have a sense of... direction... a sense that... the characters are all trying to do something... move toward something...
But in this book, things just happen to the characters, for 35 hours of audio. They do have motivations, don't get me wrong, but none of them can actually do anything about what they want, so they're all just sort of floating around and we float around with them, wondering where we're going, for 35 hours, while the characters stumble into various miserable situations without every having any clear direction, for 35 hours.
And then it ends seemingly randomly, at a clear point but a random point that doesn't end anything, because there was nothing to "end' because we were not moving towards anything. Because it was always going to end kind of randomly, because there was no sense of what an "end" would be, because it wasn't moving towards anything in particular.
Anyway. I did really love some of the characters, like Wintrow, and the Vivacia, and Althea, and their arcs were at times compelling when things happened to them although again they were kind of directionless.
But other characters were... rough. Like Malta. Malta! Malta almost did me in. I almost couldn't keep going. Like, she was a well-developed character for what her character was, but miserable to read about, and I understood the point of her story immediately, where it was going, how it was going to end up, but then it just kept going on, and on, and on, for like 400 pages of Malta being Malta. Like. "I get the point," I wanted to say. "X is gonna happen, can we just get there already" but no we had to be weirdly, confusingly subjected to a large amount of time with Malta.
In the end this book is in a very similar camp to Game of Thrones for me (though better, slightly) in that I felt like I was always reading just waiting to get to the interesting, bearable characters. Whose parts ended far too quickly, sending me back to the unpleasant characters.
Honestly, though, that would've been fine, if the book had some kind of overarching plot or direction....
Will still read book 2
I would like to come back and write down more thoughts later, but for now my main thought is.... this is the most boring long book I have ever managed to actually finish.
I really don't get all the glowing praise.... like.... at all.... how were all those people not bored? This book feels like a 35-hour prologue. There is no direction.
Usually books move... towards... something... there's some kind of.... thing pushing the action along.... you have a sense of... direction... a sense that... the characters are all trying to do something... move toward something...
But in this book, things just happen to the characters, for 35 hours of audio. They do have motivations, don't get me wrong, but none of them can actually do anything about what they want, so they're all just sort of floating around and we float around with them, wondering where we're going, for 35 hours, while the characters stumble into various miserable situations without every having any clear direction, for 35 hours.
And then it ends seemingly randomly, at a clear point but a random point that doesn't end anything, because there was nothing to "end' because we were not moving towards anything. Because it was always going to end kind of randomly, because there was no sense of what an "end" would be, because it wasn't moving towards anything in particular.
Anyway. I did really love some of the characters, like Wintrow, and the Vivacia, and Althea, and their arcs were at times compelling when things happened to them although again they were kind of directionless.
But other characters were... rough. Like Malta. Malta! Malta almost did me in. I almost couldn't keep going. Like, she was a well-developed character for what her character was, but miserable to read about, and I understood the point of her story immediately, where it was going, how it was going to end up, but then it just kept going on, and on, and on, for like 400 pages of Malta being Malta. Like. "I get the point," I wanted to say. "X is gonna happen, can we just get there already" but no we had to be weirdly, confusingly subjected to a large amount of time with Malta.
In the end this book is in a very similar camp to Game of Thrones for me (though better, slightly) in that I felt like I was always reading just waiting to get to the interesting, bearable characters. Whose parts ended far too quickly, sending me back to the unpleasant characters.
Honestly, though, that would've been fine, if the book had some kind of overarching plot or direction....
Will still read book 2