Blood of Dragons (The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 4)

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Suddenly though this then becomes one of those books where you think there's only a hundred pages left so you wonder if it will all be wrapped up in a satisfying manner. She is not a poet peppering her prose with flares of flowery or obscure language; neither is she writing a cinematic epic that skips over everything bar the big speeches and bloody battles. It's really barely a Fantasy novel, but more like slightly displaced 19th century novel set in the American West, and that's just something most Fantasy readers are used to.

Any photos or images used on this site that do not belong to the author are royalty free and licensed under creative commons, or cover images of books used to promote them. I’ll be interested to see, when I reach the end, whether it was really necessary to have read all of them.Something I find fascinating in Hobb's writing is her use of the traditional "journey" structure for a fantasy story. The dragons have got to learn to fly and make their way over to Kelsingra, so they can reach the hot baths that will help them grow and fully develop into the dragons they always should have been. I hope that next we can see all the characters come together for a final ending that sees everyone together so they can all understand everything because at the moment it seems like the rain winders need some six duchies understanding of things! I have heard people criticize the first few volumes, (especially the first), as being slow, or featuring two dimensional characters.

There are also questions that are answered, questions that arose through this series, and questions that arose from the very first series in the Realm of the Elderlings. What is doubly surprising is that this is a confrontation we've been anticipating right from the first book of the quadrilogy, and yet it absolutely doesn't disappoint at all. Thymara has been a largely passive character, which isn't essentially a problem in itself, however where in other books Hobb has taken characters from a state of passive or even actively malicious motivation to genuine growth and realization, (Malta being a prime example), Thymara just seems to sit and accept what happens, indeed Elderling transformations and magical discoveries aside I can't really say how the Thymara of Blood of Dragons is so different to the young woman we met climbing through the trees in Dragon Keeper.But I do love universes in which one can totally immerse oneself without getting anxious about niggling things like language, motivation and consistency. This is particularly notable since her plot did have the potential to include romance and her first steps into adulthood outside the dictates of her society, but in the end Blood of Dragons resolves all her romantic difficulties by default, and though for one character this resolution is an interesting one, at the same time it makes Thymara feel a little superfluous to requirements. Many setups from the earlier books are finally paid off beautifully, and the more annoying elements of the series get resolved as well. Alongside these more magical aspects there were some very satisfying moments of human drama: I’m not going to say anything about Hest, except to note that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving chap. One reason I always count Liveship as my favourite of Hobb's series, (apart from the fact that pretty much anything with both pirates and dragons is bound to captivate me), is the use of multiple characters as perspectives and the fact we're not just following one person's story as we do in the books focused on FitzChivalry.

I don’t know whether I might have felt differently about the books if I’d read them with more time between them, because barrelling through them all in one go means that I’m particularly sensitive to repetition or excessive exposition. During that time period, she and her family had moved from Alaska to Hawaii, and subsequently to Washington State, where they settled. The legendary blue dragon Tintaglia is dying of wounds inflicted by hunters sent by the Duke of Chalced, who meanwhile preserves his dwindling life by consuming the blood of the dragon’s poet Selden Vestrit.

And I think you are spot on with your observation that where The Rain Wild Chronicles fall off compared to her earlier work is that, when everything is said and done, they do not deviate all that much from the standard Epic Fantasy quest model. Blood of Dragons continues the story from the previous book, City of Dragons, with our band of young keepers and their dragons beginning to make their way into the deserted Elderling city of Kelsingra.