Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb

 The Farseer Trilogy
Assassin's Apprentice

Royal Assassin

Assassin's Quest

The Liveship Traders Trilogy

The Tawny Many Trilogy

Fool's Errand

Golden Fool

Fool's Fate

The Dragon Keeper is the first book The Rain Wilds Chronicles.  

In this book, the serpents from The Liveship Trader trilogy manage to make cases, but they hatch weak and malformed. None of them can fly or really hunt enough to sustain their own life.  The dragon Tintaglia even abandons them and the Traders are getting sick of taking care of the dragons. So the Traders hire some young people from the Rain Wilds, kids who don't have families or people who care about them, to shepherd the dragons upriver to the legendary city of Kelsingra, which may or may not exist. 

Major characters:

Thymara, one of the Rain Wilds youngsters, who has taken over the duties of watching Sintara.  Thymara is "heavily marked by the Wilds," which is how people describe those who have physical differences because of the environmental hazards of being born and living in the area. She has claws instead of hands and feet.  She leaves a loving father and snappish mother behind at home to go on her quest.  

Alise is the wife of an abusive Bingtown trader, Hest. She likes to call herself an expert on dragons and Elderlings. She's on the journey with the dragons "to do research," but we all really know that she just wants to get away from Hest and the captain of the ship is so nice.

Speaking of the captain of the ship, that's Leftrin. He captains Tarman, a liveship, and he has a huge crush on Alise. He also stole a dragon casing and started selling it, so I'm pretty sure that's going to come and bite him on the ass later.

And then there's good old Sedric, who is technically chaperoning Alise on the behest of her husband (remember Hest?).  But it quickly becomes clear that Sedric is actually Hest's lover and he really just wants to profit off of the dragons.

Rain Wilds:

I think what makes this book is the setting.  The Rain Wilds is about as different from Buckkeep as it gets.  The river is a disruptive force in this place, constantly moving, sometimes toxic, and always dangerous.  The people who live there are tough, eking out a living trying to use the meager resources left to them in the trees to survive their frequently short lives.  Babies born with deformities are often abandoned.  Hobb's descriptions of towns and cities that are built in the tree canopy were vivid and I could almost see myself walking along the swaying bridges.  If Rain Wilds was a place in the United States, it would be Cancer Alley, and I found myself really empathizing with the folks who lived there, constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Overall:

There is a lot of scene setting in this book.  I'm sure that there's going to be a payoff for all of this and for introducing so many characters so quickly, but this is probably my least favorite Hobb so far.  I mean, all we have accomplished through this book is getting the dragons partway down the river. The book just stopped at that point.  Golden Fool was a bit like this book in that the book was more about character development than plot development, but I don't know these characters or, frankly, care about them much.  

So, it's quite a big switch from hanging out with Fitz and the Fool, two beloved characters, to be thrown into this world without them.  But I trust Hobb and I trust that all this scene setting will pay off in a big way before I'm done with The Rain Wilds Chronicles.