Ship of Magic

I tried reading this series in a German translation when it was first published in paperback, and didn't enjoy it at all. Now, many years later I am finally ready to return to Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, to see how the Liveship Traders fit into the world she started building in the Farseer Trilogy.

The Vestrits are a Bingtown Trader family, and their liveship Vivacia is ready to quicken. Wizardwood can be carved into liveships by Rain Wild Traders, becoming sentient and alive, with their own distinct personality, once three generations of captains have died on board the ship. Vivacia quickens when Captain Ephron Vestrit passes away, but the quickening is hardly peaceful. Ephron has no living sons, so his ruthless son-in-law Kyle is Captain, and he drives away Althea who was really Ephron's chosen successor to be bonded to newly-woken Vivacia. Instead Kyle forces his eldest son Wintrow, a priest-in-training, to be on board to bond with Vivacia. A role Wintrow doesn't want and hates.

At the same time we learn of Captain Kennit, an ambitious pirate who really wants to be King of all pirates, and who wants to own a liveship.

Unlike the Farseer Trilogy with its almost singular focus on Fitz, Ship of Magic has many different PoVs, and a lot of them are women. There's Althea, her grandmother Ronica, Keffria Vestrit, and the youngest Vestrit girl Malta, a devious, spoiled brat. Althea was by far my favorite one, and I totally ship her with Brashen.

There were plot twists, though the finale was pretty much inevitable and predictable, but not the way it got there. The book is not easy on its likeable characters, especially Wintrow. All the liveships we meet are very interesting, with distinct personalities. I really want to know what happened to drive Paragon mad!

I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to find out the destinies of all those characters.

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb was a fascinating read for me. On the one hand the prose is beautiful, the world building deep, and the characters incredibly well crafted. On the other, that beautiful prose is sometimes a little on the verbose side and those well-crafted characters make incredibly stupid decisions at every turn to move along a fairly predictable plot. It’s almost a tale of two books, making this a very hard one to rate.

The parts of Ship of Magic that really worked for me are numerous. For starters, Hobb’s prose is just beautiful. It’s the kind of book that I want to read aloud simply to hear the words come alive. I’ve had this feeling when reading some of Hobb’s other works, and it was one of the most enjoyable things about Ship of Magic for me. The world is also amazingly detailed. I loved the magic of the liveships, and the questions of where they come from and their connection to the Rain Wilds trader families kept the pages turning. That’s to say nothing about the culture of the Bingtown traders, their satrap, the pirate islands, and all the rest that Hobb crams into this book. She drops tantalizing hints for what may come next in the trilogy. From a mad liveship, who may be hiding important truths, to the threat of revolt from a satrap who refuses to abide by the promises his forefathers made, there is a great deal of depth to the world that this novel portrays. I haven’t even touched on the way Hobb makes sailing come alive here, crafting truly evocative scenes aboard ships. It’s dazzling at times. Then, of course, there are the characters. Most of our viewpoint characters are members of or otherwise associated with the Vestrit family, a family of Bingtown Traders who are struggling to stay financially solvent in a changing world. Althea is rash and overconfident, but also the most knowledgeable of liveships and the most passionate about sailing. Her sister, Keffria, on the other hand, lacks all assertiveness and is thrust into a position as the head of the family that she seems quite ill-suited for. Althea’s nephew, Wintrow, has been in training and wants nothing more than to be a priest. He’s in some ways the most balanced and relatable of the characters, even if he does share the family penchant for utter stupidity (see below), he has less of a share of it than the other characters. Then there is Kyle Haven, Keffria’s husband, who is quite high on my list of most hated characters ever. Hobb deserves heavy accolades for shaping not only a character that I hate so much, but also characters that feel quite human in the midst of a rather bleak world.

Those characters, while lovingly crafted, were also one of the things I found most frustrating about the novel. As mentioned above, nearly all the characters make stupid decisions. Repeatedly. It’s fun the first time or two a character is an idiot, but eventually I like my characters to grow from that experience. Instead, time and time again, the characters in Ship of Magic return to the same well and do things that obviously aren’t going to work out well for them. From the opening pages, when Kyle Haven is given command of the liveship Vivacia, it seems obvious that his command will achieve nothing other than destruction. Somehow the family manages to completely miss the fact that Kyle is actually a conniving, self-serving fool. While this tendency for characters to continually make poor decisions became frustrating as the book went on, far worse was the fact that it made the plot entirely predictable. By the time we’re about 15% of the way into the book you know exactly how it’s going to end, leaving only questions of small details and the exact timing. It would have been nice to see some more character growth in this book, some sort of realization that poor decisions beget poor results and an attempt to right things. In fairness to Hobb, this is a trilogy, and by the end of Ship of Magic at least a couple of the characters appear to realize their poor decisions. Hopefully this will allow for more character growth and less predictability in subsequent books of the series.

I’m in the minority with this one. There’s obviously a lot to love in the prose and the world and the characters, even if the characters ended up not working very well for me. For whatever reason, this one didn’t engage me, but I’m confident others will have a different experience.

3.25/5 stars.

5 – I loved this, couldn’t put it down, move it to the top of your TBR pile
4 – I really enjoyed this, add it to the TBR pile
3 – It was ok, depending on your preferences it may be worth your time
2 – I didn’t like this book, it has significant flaws and I can’t recommend it
1 – I loathe this book with a most loathsome loathing