Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (2002)

This book was well written. It had good world building and a unique magic system. It treats the reader as intelligent. But the series is not for me.

My life is stressful. I read to escape. I read to feel joy. This book did not produce joy for me. Instead it's a rather bleak tale of the illegitimate son of the king's heir who trains to be an assassin and who has the gift of communing with animals. It's a harsh, medieval world. He lives a hard life and after a while, it was just too bleak and dispiriting for me. I quit about 80% through.

Plenty of people love the series and I can see why. It's top-quality and has been well-received. It's a well developed world with 3D grey characters and it's complex enough that you don't know where the story is going. All those things are there for a quality reading experience, but it just became too much for me. It was negatively affecting my emotional health. And after reading a summary of the rest of the book, I have a good idea of how this first book in the 'Farseer Trilogy' ends, so I'm fine with not reading to the very last page. The synopses of the other 2 books look to be more of the same, so I will not be continuing in the series. You may not agree and I may have loved the series at a different point in my life, but I read it now and I'm not going to continue. Even though it's a DNF for me, I'm still rating it 4 stars, because it is well written and developed and if it had hit me differently, I'm confident that this would be my rating if I read to the very last page.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I wasn't a big fan of the audiobook narrator used. It made Fitz (the narrator, looking back and relating the tale of his life, rather than being the boy who's living those moments) really toffee-nosed/pretentious and it kept me from engaging. That disconnect kept me from liking Fitz (the boy) more.