Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

"Tell this to King Shrewd. Our population grows, but there is a limit to our arable soil. Wild game will only feed so many. Comes a time when a country must open itself to trade, especially so rocky and mountainous a country as mine. You have heard, perhaps, that the Jhaampe way is that the ruler is the servant of his people? Well, I serve them in this wise. I marry my beloved younger sister away, in the hopes of winning grain and trade routes and lowland goods for my people, and grazing rights in the cold part of the year when our pastures are under snow. For this, too, I am willing to give you timbers, the great straight timbers that Verity will need to build his warships. Our mountains grow white oak such as you have never seen. This is a thing my father would refuse. He has the old feelings about the cutting of live trees, And like Regal, he sees your coast as a liability, your ocean as a great barrier. But I see it as your father did--a wide road that leads in all directions, and your coast as our access to it. And I see no offense in using trees uprooted by the annual floods and windstorms."

Very few times do you find a fiction novel like this that makes you really understand what it means to live in the real world...or at least one that I'll actually enjoy reading. A lot of attempts are made, I guess, focusing on the problems invasions by foreigners, but few go further to be viewed through the eyes of a bastard son of the crown prince turned assassin for the king, his grandfather. I mean, you can get a number of ideas about the world we live in just by judging how well the kingdom's ambassadors do their job of actually knowing the people they are visiting...and the importance of information and allies.

I highly rate this 1st book in the series.

Winter Break Reading

I didn't read as much over winter break as I could have, but I worked and had a ton of mail to answer. But I did get to finally finish 2 books that I started over Thanksgiving. They were The Sleeping Beauty by Mercedes Lackey and Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb. Both were, I admit, slow reading at first, but in both cases the story is well worth the time. In the case of Royal Assassin, I don't think it would be possible to write such an epic story without all the detail. I highly recommend both books.

With graduation looming only 4 months from now, I have a lot of stuff that's going to get in my way of reading, but I suspect that there will be 4 upcoming posts illustrating gender in the civil war, since that's what my history thesis will be dealing with. I'm excited to read these books.