Robin Hobb

One of the best authors I know of; she's right up there on the top with Katharine Kerr even though they're very different writers. Her latest series are The Rain Wild Chronicles, so far with two books as I know of. Usually there's three but this one that I read, the second, seemed to wrap things up so nicely that it kind of felt like an ending. But I'd be very happy if there is a third one.

I don't remember how I came upon Robin Hobb the first time but I know it was The Farseer trilogy that first caught my attention. With Fitz. FitzChivalry Farseer, the bastard son of the crown prince that causes changes where ever he goes. He's the story teller and I instantly fell in love with him. He also tells the story in The Tawny Man trilogy which is even better than the first one.

Anyway, Fitz is nowhere to be seen or mentioned in The Rain Wild Chronicles but it takes place in the same world and not too far away from him either. The Rain wilds are a strange and hostile place with an ever changing river running with acid, no dry land and poisonous animals. The people who lives there never becomes very old, they give birth to few healthy children and those who live always suffers from disfiguring growths and other deformations. Children who are heavily marked since birth from the Rain wilds are usually disposed of because they won't live long anyway and if they do they won't give birth to healthy children so why waste food and love on them in a place where it's hard to live even for the healthy ones? But sometimes they are spared, for better or for worse, and become the outcast in the society.
Now, dragons have been hatched but they are badly formed and can't hunt for themselves, worse, they are bad tempered, always hungry and very dangerous to humans. They can't stay where they are, close to town and people. They need to be moved. By whom? Why not the outcasts? And they set off up river to find an ancient city the dragons remember in their dreams. This is told in the first book, Dragon Keepers, and dull as it may sound; it's marvelous.

Robin Hobb can use old concepts, like dragons and magic, and give them a perfectly new dimension, but what captures me the most is the characters. And the intrigues. It may be a fantasy setting but the play between the characters are very real to day. There's the usual stuff; greed, love, surviving and all the other things we've all read about before. But there's also segregation, ignorance regarding life and the will of others than your own, and learning new ways. Also, Hobb is not afraid to bring a queer aspect into her story telling which is evident in all the books I've read by her. And she's capable enough to make the queer as ordinary as the not queer. She doesn't make it strange or exotic, scandalous or glorify it. She doesn't make a point of it. Some people seem to think that if a character is queer in any way it's the queerness you have to focus on. Not true. If a man falls in love with a woman, or the other way around, nobody lifts an eyebrow. Hobb got the skill, and the intelligence, to do that with queerness and recognize the necessity of it, yet without leaving out the important differences between a queer life and an "ordinary" one, the life you're expected to live. Robin Hobb does it with grace and without spoiling the rest of the story; it's just as much a natural part of it as the noble and married lady falling in love with the rough and common man who captains' the river barge and all the complications which that leads to. Dragon Haven was just as marvelous a book as the first one, or better.

Even if you're not a fan of fantasy you won't be able to stop yourself from falling in love with one or several of the characters in this story. You just want more. I stayed up 'til six o'clock in the morning to read before I slept three or four hours just so I could read some more. I never want it to end and already I'm wating for an other story from Robin Hobb.