Mad Ship Review
As a note, this is the day after Easter. I have had so much dang candy the last day or so that this may actually be completely incoherent even though I’ve read through it more than once. So. Much. Sugar… (insert facepalm).
This book was fantastic. As a middle book in a trilogy, you don’t expect an ultimate beginning or a total conclusion since you’re 800 pages in and have another 800 pages when you’re done. But Hobb does a fantastic job of making this book a complete story that wraps up some things while leaving massive questions to be answered in the finale. Which I haven’t read yet, but will start in the next couple weeks because I NEED ANSWERS!! Also remember, Hobb is going to torture the poor characters while (or by) giving them what they think they want. You can’t look away, but you don’t really want to see what’s going on either. It’s fabulous.
Our main characters here fall into basically two groups in this book. The women of the Vestrit family in Bingtown, and the men of the Vestrit family with the pirates on the Liveship Vivacia. And none of them are doing great, honestly. In Bingtown they’re selling off everything they can to stay solvent until Vivacia comes home with cash or goods. Ronica is feeling older by the day, Keffria is struggling to take an active hand after years of letting things go by, and Malta is looking for a man to protect her (or something…). Althea comes home and works right with them at it until Brashen comes back and tells them about Vivacia being pirated. Meanwhile, the pirates are keeping Wintrow happy and Kyle locked up more or less while they go about their pirate business. Kennit eventually recovers with help from Vivacia and Wintrow and goes about seducing the ship any way he can, the scumbag.
Meanwhile: there are sea serpents everywhere, and they attack vessels and even sink them sometimes. The Rain Wilders have one more wizardwood log to make into liveships but the dragon in it won’t shut up. The Satrap decides to visit Bingtown and ‘clear up the misunderstandings’ but he’s a butt with no abilites outside of sex and drugs. And the evil Chalced ships are everywhere making trouble, from Chalced down to Jamailia.
Through it all, Hobb weaves themes. Is slavery worth it monetarily even though it’s morally reprehensible? What makes a person travel through the stages of life from childhood to adulthood? Is there a definite line that works for everyone across cultures? How much is too much to pay for safety? If we forget who we were in the past, how can we become what we should be in the future? So many weighty questions, and definitely not all can be answered either here, or in the story. It makes this a fabulous book for self-reflection, however. Who was I before, from before the pandemic, before the last move, before kids… and is what I’m doing now relating to any of that, or am I just a different person completely? Who has helped me become the person I am today, in the layers of personality.
Anyway, into this beautifully choreographed mess we add Paragon, the mad liveship that Althea, Brashen, and Amber are taking off the beach to try and rescue Vivacia and her crew. Maybe he will kill them all. Maybe his hidden backstory make him the perfect ship for this job even if he can’t fully remember it. And just as everything twists once more, we get to the end of the book!! With a DRAGON!
I’m really looking forward to the final book of this series. I want the bad guys to get what’s coming to them. And the good guys (women? A lot of them are women) to get what they deserve too, which is to sit comfortably ever after with their feet up. If that’s what they want. I want MORE DRAGONS and more magic, even though this is a low-magic series and that’s just fine in general. And I want Althea and Brashen together happily ever after, but that might be asking a bit too much. Can you tell I’m a sucker for a happy ending? But the bittersweet endings are almost better, they stay with you longer. Which will this series have? To be determined (for me at least; I’m sure a bunch of you have already read these as they’re over 20 years old now!).
