The Liveship Traders Trilogy

The Liveship Traders Trilogy
Ship of Magic (1998) The Mad Ship (1999) Ship of Destiny (2000) Robin Hobb

The most frustrating thing about this series, is that I didn’t particularly like any of the characters. The story was great, the writing was great, but not only were there characters that I really liked and was invested in, I actively disliked a couple of the characters. Which made this book hard to read. Yet I still had to know what happened, and thus devoured the story, even as part of me wished that I was reading about someone else.

The only characters I actually liked were Amber and the two ships, Paragon and Vivacia. The rest of the main characters I found annoying, frustrating, or plain dislikable. Although many of the characters did manage to grow up and redeem themselves by the end of the book, I just didn’t care as much as I normally do.

Of course that should be seen as a credit to her writing, the characters were well written and believable–unfortunately they mostly seemed like people I didn’t care to know.

But as I said, the story was fantastic, and although not necessary to read, is important to events that occur in the later Tawny Man series.

So I can’t recommend these books one way or the other. I didn’t care for the characters, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like them, and the story really is very good.

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