Book Review: City of Dragon’s

Book Review: City of Dragons (Book #3 of the Rain Wilds Chronicles) by: Robin Hobb

I gave this book three out of five stars.

If you expect the third book to flow seamlessly into the first two books of the series, you will be disappointed. Older characters from other series are revived and the first one hundred pages are spent introducing new-old characters. Madness, utter madness, but then really there were only a few plot climaxes left to the original story.

What I liked:

1) The city of Kelsingra. I enjoyed learning about the city and seeing it come to life. I think that was undoubtedly the best part of the book.

2) The continuing changes for Thymara. Did Thymara actually pick a partner? Way to go Hobb, upping the drama. This might be the one plot line that gets me to read book 4.

3) There is some really fun action in this book. Without giving away any spoilers let me just say, a character gets shanked in a brothel, dragons may or may not learn to fly, Thymara may or may not mate, and a dying Duke may or may not get healed.

What I didn’t like:

1) The redundancy. Did I mention before how redundant Hobb can be in her characterizations and narratives? In case you missed it, or missed it in my last review, Hobb writes a lot of redundant things. The repetition is annoying.

2) There were several monologues of narrative, which the author tried to hide as character dialogue. There are at least three scenes where characters monologue back and forth with stagey information. These are just contrite and silly, not only do people not talk to one another like this, these character have no need to tell each other this information. I wish Hobb would just write a narrative. Write a quick narrative, and while you write it, imagine your reader is smart and stop bringing up the same details over and over again.

3) Why is the evil Duke still alive? If he is such a bad guy, hated by everyone, weak, defenseless, and dying he should be dead. Should be easy for even his servants to just kill. It doesn’t make sense to me why he has the ability to wield the power he does when he should be easy to kill and overthrow.

I plan on reading the next book. I don’t know if book four is the end, but I would like to see this series end. I’m hoping Hobb has something sinister in store for Hest. I hated that he was a key character in this book. Kill that man off already. I also look forward to reading about what happens with Sintara and Thymara.