I loved the first book of this series, so perhaps it should be no surprise that this one didn't quite live up to my expectations. It's hard to keep up momentum like that, for one thing, and for another, it's the middle book in the series. Nevare spends a lot of time feeling his way around, trying to learn to accept the world as it is, rather than as he wishes that it would be. And Nevare is a stubborn guy. No matter what evidence he's presented with, he does not want to believe that magic exists and that it's taken root in his life in a drastic way. Even when he does believe, it's in this halfhearted way that gets incredibly annoying by the end of the book. And to be honest, that's my biggest quibble with this book. Nevare spends way too much time denying things that he must know in his heart are true.

As many of the other reviews say, there's a lot of darkness in this book. Bad things happen to Nevare, pretty much one after the other. However, unlike a lot of people, that didn't bother me. Or rather, I didn't feel like my enjoyment of the book suffered from it. I felt bad for Nevare certainly, and I rooted for things to turn around for him. A huge part of me still really wants him to have a happy ending, although I feel like that's extremely unlikely. And yet, I wasn't put off by all of these bad things. I wanted to know more of what happened, and I wanted to see things get better, no matter how unlikely that may be. I was nervous about that going into this book, as so many of the reviews are mediocre at best.

I still really enjoyed Nevare as a character. Although bad things happen to him, he soldiers on. He tries to fulfill his dreams. He tries to protect the people he cares about. Hell, he still cares about people, even after some pretty devastating losses in that department. I feel like he's a really strong character, even though he isn't given a lot of agency by the story.

I also thought that it was interesting how the question of Nevare's weight is handled throughout the book. I try to be a very open-minded and accepting person, but a revulsion for fat is pretty deeply ingrained into our society, and reading this made me realize that I still have quite a ways to go in my thinking about weight. The way that people treat Nevare throughout the book, simply because of his weight, was definitely hard for me to deal with. It really made me think.

I'm definitely going to be continuing on to the next book in the series in short order - basically, as soon as I can fit it into my reading rotation. Robin Hobb is truly a fantastic author, and I'm glad that I'm working on getting caught up on her works again.