Title: Assassins apprentice

Author: Robin Hobb

Format: paperback/Audiobook

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Page count: 392

Release day: May 1995

Series: Farseer trilogy #1

Rating: 3.5 stars

What is it about?

This book is about the bastard son of the king-in-waiting, mostly called Fitz. When he is about 6 years old he is ‘given’ the king to take care of. Unfortunately for him his father never claims him, so he does not grow up in the castle, but in the stables. He learns how to work in the stables, how to fight and many more. At some point the kings has plans for him and he learns to be an assassin. He does need to keep this quite from Burrich, the one who raised him so far, so he starts to live a double life. This becoming an assassin and hiding this from Burrich brings him in some interesting situations, which are sometimes hard to get out off.

What I thought:

I had really high expectations for this book, I always heard that Robin Hobb is one of the best fantasy writers. But unfortunately I did not enjoy this book as much as I had expected, which does not mean I did not like it, because I did!

First of all, I really enjoyed the fact that there was a male main character! For some reason I mostly read books with female main characters even though I enjoy reading from both male and female characters!

The reason why I did not enjoy this as much as expected was because I had a hard time getting into the book. And I think that was mainly because of the writing style, the book just felt really slow even though things were happening. Because of this I did not really feel like picking the book back up, so I started the audiobook and read and listened at the same time. That really helped me a lot!

The narrator of the audiobook (Paul Boehmer) was really good! In my opinion his voice really fitted the main character. The audiobook also helped me with the pronunciation of all the names 😉

I really liked that this book does not really contain romance!

I do feel this book was really setting up for the sequel, and I’m excited to start reading sometime in the future, maybe not to soon haha. But I will definitely read and listen then again!

Advise for:

Fantasy lovers, who do not want romance! But be aware of the slow writing style!