Skip to main content

Review: The Soldier's Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb

By
An odd thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I was out and about when I found myself with 10 minutes to spare. Why not pop in the bookshop and see what they had to offer. I found the final two books of the Soldier's Son trilogy - the first book had languished on my bookshelf under a self-imposed ban until I got the final two. With a widening grin I grabbed both of them and started the trilogy that night.

It should be said I've been a huge fan of Robin Hobb, I love her other trilogies and have waited for the final books to come out. It was worth it.
The writing style is immersive as always, and builds a believable world for the main protagonist, Nevare Burvelle, to run around in. The rich details of his life and the amazing twists and turns it takes are vividly rendered by Hobb's superb narrative. Writing from the first person perspective must be challenging at times, without the ability to jump to another place or time and fill in the back story, but Hobb does it well and as the character learns key events, his perception of what is happening fills the story for us.
Something I've always been opposed to in fantasy books has been guns and normally I avoid them when they come up with it. This book, however, includes them in a very natural way, combining the chivarly of the Knighthood with the tactics of long rifles and clutch pistols. The "Old" nobles and the "New" nobles show the changes in the society and the effect the new technology is having - but all told, it's the magic of the world and the Old Gods that have the true control. Hobb's weaving of these elements is superb and there were several long nights where I read until the wee hours, drawn so deeply into the tale that I forgot what time it was and only surrendered to sleep when my eyes stopped focusing. In my view that's the sign of a damn good book.
I was very pleased to note that the series wound everything up at the end. I was able to put the final book down with great satisfaction and knowledge that the story - or rather the bulk of the exciting stuff - was pretty well finished. There have been several other writers out there (Robert Jordan I'm looking at you) who leave things hanging at the end of a 600 page book and you wonder what is to happen next, will there be more or not? The Soldier's Son trilogy has none of that and wraps up wonderfully. I read for enjoyment and this series certainly provided that. Bravo Robin Hobb - I look forward to your next books with great anticipation.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

By
One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years. These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful. The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM ( www.openkm.com ). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgradin
Post a Comment
Read more

Musings on System Administration

By
I was reading an article discussing forensic preparation for computer systems. Some of the stuff in there I knew the general theory of, but not the specifics of how to perform. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that Systems Administration is such a vast field. There is no way I can know all of this stuff. I made a list of the software and operating systems I currently manage. They include: - Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise - Exchange 2003 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 2000 - Ubuntu Linux - OpenSuSE Linux - Mac OSX (10.3 and 10.4) - Solaris 8 - SQL 2005 - Various specialised software for the transport industry I have specific knowledge on some of this, broad knowledge on all of it, and always think "There's so much I *don't* know". It gets a bit down heartening sometimes. For one thing - I have no clue about SQL 2005 and I need to make it work with another bit of software. All complicated and nothing straightforward. Irritating doesn&
Post a Comment
Read more

Traffic Monitoring using Ubuntu Linux, ntop, iftop and bridging

By
This is an update of an older post, as the utilities change, so has this concept of a cheap network spike - I use it to troubleshoot network issues, usually between a router and the network to understand what traffic is going where. The concept involves a transparent bridge between two network interface cards, and then looking at that traffic with a variety of tools to determine network traffic specifics. Most recently I used one to determine if a 4MB SDSL connection was saturated or not. It turned out the router was incorrectly configured and the connection had a maximum usage under 100Kb/s (!) At $1600 / month it's probably important to get this right - especially when the client was considering upgrading to a faster (and more expensive) link based on their DSL provider's advice. Hardware requirements: I'm using an old Dell Vostro desktop PC with a dual gigabit NIC in it - low profile and fits into the box nicely. Added a bit of extra RAM and a decent disk and that&
6 comments
Read more