Hari Gopal

I was starting to think that picking up this book was a good idea.

But then the author decides to have the protagonist cheat in a game, a game he was sure to win anyway, when a character he knows is crazy supplies the opportunity.

And then he gets blackmailed for it, thus forming the reason for the story to get started. Pathetic. Lead character being an idiot and a cheater makes it impossible for me to consider continuing reading this one.

There's only so much negativity that I can take before I decide that a book isn't worth it. Considering the fact that I really liked the first, I had high hopes for this one; But the whole air of hopelessness that hangs over every single event in Royal Assassin just makes it hard to swallow. I'd have imagined the lead character ‘Fitz' to have grown up a bit for this second book but, if anything, he's more of an idiot. Some of the decisions made by the good guys just make no sense whatsoever.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

We're told in this book that Fitz is strong in the ‘Skill', but because of how he was traumatized by Galen's teachings, he's somehow blocked his own powers. We're also told that the King-in-waiting - who desperately needs strong Skill-users - simply has no time to teach Galen how to to use his powers. I'm simply not able to swallow that load of rubbish! Practically all of the problems in this book follow from our dear Fitz being powerless to do anything!

Then there's how the Verity and Shrewd manage Regal. If one of your sons just tried to (and nearly did) kill the other - I imagine there'd be a bit of an issue raised. In Robin Hobb's world, the worst that the perpetrator can expect is a slap on the hand and a (gentle) reminder that it isn't polite to kill one's siblings.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the ‘Fool' character - Hobb tries so hard to make him interesting, fascinating, and all that - but the fact that his cryptic clues always leave our poor dim-witted Fitz scratching his head... it just makes for really poor reading material.

So... I'm definitely not picking up the third book and, possibly not any R.H. books - for a very long while.

I hate to think of the amount of time I spent on this, well, worthless book. My problem with it lies in how I kept hoping the story would start making some sort of sense - and it doesn't. I got to see a guy named Shadow take a ridiculous trip across America meeting some weird people and getting into some weird situations. At the end of it, I can't see what the point of it all was. Maybe its because I'm not American? I'm not so sure. There's something fundamentally wrong about this book. I can't say what it is though.