I finished Forest Mage recently; it was the 11th Robin Hobb that I have finished. I really did not enjoy this book at all. And reflecting back on the story, I outright disliked this book so much that I’ve given up on reading the final installment, Renegade’s Magic. I had much the same feeling with one of her other books, Assassin’s Quest, but after some reflection, I realized that much of my frustration with that book was that I wasn’t embracing the story she was telling, but instead I was expecting to read the story that I was imaging. I was able to reconcile this enough to try the Liveship Trilogy which I thought was outstanding.
The thing is, I don’t feel any such reconciliation about Forest Mage. I sure would like to think my 1400 page investment wasn’t for nothing. So did anyone else read this book? What did you think? And is there anything that I am missing that would encourage me to soldier on?
I really enjoyed Shaman’s Crossing. I thought the time-period was really interesting as were the parallels between Gernia and the colonization of America. I found the different settings and cultures kept my interest through the entire book. I enjoyed the twists near the end and I appreciated the plot resolution at the very end (a major weakness in some of her other books). When I first started reading, I was disappointed to see it was in first-person, but it turned out not to be a problem. Nor was Nevare a clone of Fitz or the King’s Cavalla Academy a clone of Hogwarts.
However, Forest Mage seemed to be phoned-in. The book was so-so up until Gettys, but at that point in stagnated. The showdown with Dewara was anticlimactic and the lack of any resolution at the ending was a return to the weakness of the Royal Assassain trilogy. Some of the characters, like Amzil, the scout, the Colonel, and Sgt. Hoster were interesting. But a lof of the major characters, like Spink and Epiny, were completely lifeless.
While I could eventually buy the complete character changes of his friends and family, I was put off by a few: Sergeant Duril turns from a sharp and crusty sergeant to an intelligent and introspective mentor with a tender heart. Likewise one of Nevare’s graveyard buddys (Kester?) turns from half-wit, ditch digger to a guy that waxes about the pride of the unit. Despite all of the pages dedicated to Nevare’s relationship with the Specks, we really don’t discover much that is interesting about them. I would have liked to learn more about the Specks, the other mage, Jobi, and Lisana.
Then there is the magic, it affects pretty much everyone – his friends, family, the school doctor, the entire town of Gettys. It is so powerful it can turn his own family, even his sister, against him. It drags on Spink and Epiny, the later to the point of attempting suicide. It does everything it can to force Nevare to do its task. And yet, there are random spots of complete immunity: Duril seems immune, Nevare’s uncle too, Spink and Epiny never doubt Nevare. And this magic is so powerful that it can dominate an entire town, but it can’t bend the tide of the road. OK, maybe the magic is stubborn and not pragmatic; it would rather chance losing the trees of knowledge instead of rerouting the road. But the worst part about the magic is that it nullifies most of the character development of the entire book. We find out that all of the pages describing his father turning into a psychotic asshole weren’t character development, but instead just a plot device completely out of his control. Ditto for the rest of Nevare’s family, friends, neighbors, and the town of Gettys. They don’t really hate fat people that much, the magic is making them do it. They aren’t that class-ist, the magic is doing it. What is the point about reading a story about some nebulous super-magic that can twist the plot and characters in any direction?
But the thing that bothered me the most was the morphing of Nevare into Fitz 2.0. In Shaman’s Crossing, Nevare is intelligent, optimistic, very naive, and too risk-adverse. By the end of Forest Mage, Nevare becomes Fitz: a slow-witted, whiny hermit that is freakishly stubborn but refuses to take action under the false pretense that it protects those he cares about despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I was interested to read about this character once (or actually six times), but I don’t need to read about a clone of him.
So what do you think? Am I way off-base? Are there good reasons to continue?