Friends of r/Fantasy, when I finished reading The Wheel of Time three years ago I did not think that I would ever find a character that was better written than Rand al'Thor. I was completely blown away by his character arc, and even to this day, I remember it with awe.

Then, last year, I reread my favorite series, The Green Bone Saga, and decided on this reread that I had to put Kaul Hiloshudon above Rand in terms of pure quality of writing. The legend Fonda Lee managed to stun me even more in three books than Jordan did in fifteen! Once again, I did not think I would ever find a better character in all of fantasy.

And then I decided to continue The Realm of the Elderlings, and at 6:40am on Dec 31, 2024, after staying up all night reading, I finished Assassin's Fate, and once more, my preconceptions have been shattered.

This is my spoiler-free review of the series. For those who don't know, the Realm of the Elderlings is composed of 5 subseries, and I'll be referring to these throughout the review. These are, in order: The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders Trilogy, The Tawny Man Trilogy, The Rain Wilds Chronicles, and The Fitz and the Fool Trilogy.

Characters

Robin Hobb's main character in the Realm of the Elderlings is FitzChivalry Farseer, the bastard son of Chivalry, the former heir to the Farseer throne (who abdicated his position and left it to his younger brother Verity). Over the course of the Farseer Trilogy, The Tawny Man Trilogy, and the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy, we see Fitz's growth and evolution across three different stages of his life: his childhood through his early twenties, his mid-thirties, and his sixties.

Fitz has the greatest character story I've ever seen put to the page. I mean truly, it is stunning. A lot of people find him frustrating to read in the first trilogy, and I understand this: Fitz can be almost deliberately obtuse, annoying, and seems to sabotage his own happiness at every chance he gets. But one of the best parts of reading this series is seeing how over decades of time, Fitz grows, reflects on his past experiences, and learns to be a more whole person and how to live with his own trauma.

Fitz is also surrounded by a plethora of excellent characters. Robin Hobb really understands that good character development isn't just about giving your character a rich internal life, but about giving them dynamic, interesting relationships as well. And so we see his really well developed relationships with his mentor Chade, father figures Verity and Burrich, mother figure Patience, friends Kettricken and the Fool, lovers (will not spoil these), and many more that come in sequel series. None of these relationships are static, and all of them are complex. All of them illustrate a different facet of Fitz's personality while also being rich and interesting characters in their own right.

What about outside the Fitz books? Well I have a few more problems here. I do think Malta Vestrit and Kennit in the Liveship Traders trilogy are two of the greatest characters ever put to the page; unfortunately, the other characters in The Liveship Traders are quite lacking for me. One character, Althea Vestrit, starts off as the driving force behind Ship of Magic, but in my opinion, her story becomes quite boring in The Mad Ship and goes a bit off the rails in Ship of Destiny. None of the other characters were ever quite interesting enough for me to really feel like they were worth spending much time with, and worse, I actually felt that after the first book, Robin Hobb started giving POVs to as many characters as she could, which really bloated the books without adding much. A lot of the characters were exposed as being quite hollow and shallow once we saw their inner lives in the sequels.

I did enjoy the characters in the Rain Wilds Chronicles a little more, though. While none of them are on the level of Malta and Kennit, I personally found them to be quite compelling in their own right. Three of the four protagonists in this quartet are struggling with their self-confidence in one way or another, and two of the four are struggling with overcoming their selfishness and trying to do the right thing. As these books are shorter, but there are more of them, I found that their arcs felt more tight while also being able to still hit the same number of stages of development as other characters in the larger series, making these some of the better written character arcs overall.

TLDR: Read the Fitz books for sure, but I would not consider Liveships necessary for the Fitz character story—though it is unfortunately necessary to fully understand some of the worldbuilding/plot points in the final book. Rain Wilds is kind of a soft sequel to Liveships, so if you get through Liveships definitely read Rain Wilds.

Plot and Pacing

This is probably Robin Hobb's greatest weakness as an author. Most of her books don't have much of a plot, instead engaging with the minutiae of the characters' daily lives. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as it allows us to get really close to the characters (indeed, I praised Robert Jordan for the very same thing in The Wheel of Time, and Hobb does it even better), but it does leave a few of the books feeling aimless, bloated, or just plodding. In particular, I struggled with this in Assassin's Quest, where Fitz spends a lot of the book alone and wandering through the countryside, and in The Mad Ship and Ship of Destiny where the book becomes bloated with far too many low-quality POVs.

That being said, she does have moments of brilliance when it comes to plot and pacing. Fool's Errand feels like an apology for Assassin's Quest, with a really well structured quest storyline. Fool's Fate has a very well-structured extended denouement. Dragon Haven is straight up a disaster story like Titanic that uses a flood to drag the characters through a crucible that incites the inevitable changes their personalities were meant to go through after the setup in the first book, Dragon Keeper. Fool's Assassin is a slice of life story that somehow always retains a strong sense of dynamism and progress and covers well over a decade of time.

So, it's not all bad. For the most part it isn't noticeable as the characters are strong, but sometimes it even gets quite good!

Prose

Hobb is one of the most beautiful prose writers in SFF, and maybe ever. Her style is incredibly rich, especially in the Fitz books where she layers her own style with Fitz's voice, and some of her sentences read almost like poetry. At the same time, she's not using particularly complex words or sentence structures either. It's more about having a strong talent for selecting the correct words and correct sentence structures to make it work. I have one friend who reads Hobb's books for the prose alone!

Themes

This is kind of an interesting point to discuss because it's very rare that I feel like Hobb ever tries to address themes directly in her books, but a lot of ideas do keep popping up over and over, namely how different people respond to trauma, how memory shapes who we are, the importance of being able to choose your own destiny, the importance of accepting that other people might choose a destiny that you think is not good for them, paying reparations to those who have been done wrong, what makes a good parent, what makes a good friend, what is true love, and more.

One thing I have come to observe from chatting with people in the Robin Hobb Discord server about this series, though, is that because Hobb brings little of her own commentary to the series, everyone brings a little bit of themselves to understanding the themes. You could put 5 different people in a conversation about this series' themes, and you would get 5 radically different opinions based on 5 radically different experiences. I haven't had this experience with many other series—like, my friends and I tend to get the same things out of Brandon Sanderson books or Joe Abercrombie books, but the only three series we've read that allow us to interpret characters and themes so differently from one another are The Realm of the Elderlings, The Wheel of Time, and The Green Bone Saga.

It's something I really love about this series, because Hobb clearly trusts her readers to arrive at their own conclusions about the world, characters, and ideas explored in the series, and doesn't hold our hand to explain what she thinks. The story really isn't didactic, it's the beginning of a conversation.

Should you read it?

Yes. I suppose the only people I wouldn't really recommend this series to are those who are plot-driven readers, but honestly, I feel like even they will get a lot out of this series. We all, I feel, have an innate desire to understand the complexity in the world around us, and Hobb's books explore that complexity through a fantasy lens so incredibly well.

If you haven't read these books yet, please do! If you've read only a few of them, I urge you to continue, as they only get better in my opinion.

Conclusion

Here's my ranking of the books:

1. Fool's Fate – 5 stars
2. Assassin's Fate – 5 stars
3. Fool's Assassin – 5 stars
4. Golden Fool – 5 stars
5. Royal Assassin – 5 stars
6. Fool's Quest – 5 stars
7. Dragon Haven – 5 stars
8. Fool's Errand – 5 stars
9. Dragon Keeper – 4 stars
10. Ship of Magic – 4 stars
11. Assassin's Apprentice – 4 stars
12. Blood of Dragons – 4 stars
13. City of Dragons – 3 stars
14. Ship of Destiny – 3 stars
15. Assassin's Quest – 3 stars
16. The Mad Ship – 3 stars

Here it is laid out in series order:

The Farseer Trilogy

• Assassin's Apprentice – 4 stars
• Royal Assassin – 5 stars
• Assassin's Quest – 3 stars

The Liveship Traders Trilogy

• Ship of Magic – 4 stars
• The Mad Ship – 3 stars
• Ship of Destiny – 3 stars

The Tawny Man Trilogy

• Fool's Errand – 5 stars
• The Golden Fool – 5 stars
• Fool's Fate – 5 stars

The Rain Wilds Chronicles

• Dragon Keeper – 4 stars
• Dragon Haven – 5 stars
• City of Dragons – 3 stars
• Blood of Dragons – 4 stars

The Fitz and the Fool Trilogy

• Fool's Assassin – 5 stars
• Fool's Quest – 5 stars
• Assassin's Fate – 5 stars

Let me know what you all think! I'm happy to discuss spoilers in the comments, but remember to use spoiler tags.