The Farseer Trilogy
The Liveship Traders Trilogy
The Tawny Many Trilogy
Have you ever finished a book and just felt so melancholy about the ending? There's a happy ending, I guess, but it's sort of a bittersweet happiness that just rubs you the wrong way? You're looking around your house and wondering how anything can possibly be normal again now that you know how this book ends? That's how I felt here.
Fool's Fate is the conclusion of the Tawny Man trilogy and we're sort of in the middle of the Realm of the Elderlings (RotE) saga. There's a whole trilogy left of Fitz and the Fool and so I think some of the bittersweetness I'm feeling might go away, but for now, this ending feels final, but final in a sad way.
This isn't a perfect book. It takes Fitz and Dutiful (who is SUCH a jerk of a 15-year-old in this book, which is spot on perfect character development, but the reason that The Order of the Phoenix is so hard to get through) forever to get to the ice world where Dutiful must kill a dragon to earn the love of his lady. It's endless pages of getting on a boat, dealing with seasickness, getting to some place for some dumb reason, and then repeating that cycle. I like a book on a boat, but it was not interesting and not original enough for me to deal with hundreds of pages of it. Once we got to the ice world, things did get interesting.
And I have major criticisms of the relationship between Fitz and Molly, a character I despise so much I have mentioned her only ONCE in all these books, despite her centrality to the gloominess of Fitz's life. It's just...it's not realistic to me that Molly would take on any of the actions that she does in this book or any of the previous ones. Molly is awful and Fitz's inability to recognize that she's awful makes me think less of him, even though Fitz's cluelessness and inability to do anything correctly is part of the reason why I love him.
Sure, the surface of this book was about a quest to kill a dragon, but the real theme of this book is found family. Fitz's relationship with the Fool is the most obvious example, but also the Witted coterie, the love between Fitz and Burrich, Fitz and Patience, and Fitz and Burrich's children. It's stunning to see the development of these relationships and to see how important they are to Fitz's happiness. From a boy abandoned by his mother and taken care of by a stablemaster to a man with a big family full of hope and joy, Fitz is an example of how found family frequently matters more than blood family.
The Rain Wilds Chronicles are next in the RotE world, so we'll take a break from Fitz. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'm hoping that there will be enough references to the previous books to keep me interested.
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