Hobb brings the Liveship Traders trilogy to a close, spinning a tremendous number of plates in the air, and she almost succeeds in not dropping any. As with the earlier books, a large number of characters feature and we have multiple points of view in different scenes/chapters. In a few places, the characters don't quite live up to previous expectations, principally Althea who goes from being a strong capable woman to one prepared to give up all her dreams, and who becomes a bit of a caricature even before that, especially contrasted with Jek the Six Duchies woman who is the 'real deal' as a female sailor.

Politics plays an enormous part in the story and Malta becomes a key player in the thrashing out of a new relationship between Jamaillia and Bingtown, rather than Companion Serilla who was built up to be such in the earlier volumes. A main strand in the story is the final working out of the whole sea-serpent-dragon-liveship connection. There is some early emphasis on the vicissitudes of Bingtown, but these are abandoned for much of the book with only a brief return to Bingtown and the characters there at the end to bring those ends to a tidy tying-up.

Kennit the Pirate King, as he has now become, progresses to absolute villainy, although I had a problem with believing this which deterred me from granting this volume a 5 star rating. Paragon is confirmed to be the Ludluck family ship, and the boy Kennit the Ludluck heir, held captive after despicable things are done to his parents, to ensure Paragon's compliance with the commands of the psychopathically evil pirate Igrot. But if Paragon truly took away the pain of all that was done to Kennit, not only sexual abuse but being beaten to death twice (and brought back and healed by Paragon) then why is Kennit compelled to inflict abuse on others, especially Althea? We're told repeatedly that Paragon absorbed the pain of the memories into himself, and that his need to keep them secret for Kennit is principally to blame for his episodes of madness - though being made from two different dragons couldn't have helped - yet Kennit is so obsessed with the idea of hiding what happened to him that he does his best to destroy Paragon and the remnant of her crew. It's difficult to believe that he would do that if his memories had been sanitised and had no traumatic emotional content.

We already knew that Kennit was thoroughly unpleasant from all the POV sections in the previous volumes - he abolishes slavery yet he does it only to create a powerbase, he debates whether or not to kill various people who are devoted to him, including Sorcor and Etta, whenever he thinks they might be becoming inconvenient to him in some way. So what he does towards the close of this book seems gratuitous, because if there is no emotional pain left around his boyhood memories - at least the ones that happened to him at the hands of Igrot rather than the loss of his idyllic early childhood with his parents - why does he have the compulsion to act them out? It also seems rather convenient that he goes charging over to the enemy ship to put himself at their mercy, an action that seems completely out of character to his previous cold calculating nature. Almost as convenient as what happens to the hideous Kyle Haven.

Another element that is not quite convincing enough is the apparent ease with which Vivacia merges with the dragon-self Bolt after attempting to die with Althea. There's a hint that the serpents somehow leant her strength, but it was rather too abrupt a transition.

When the threads are tidied up at the end of the story there is a huge revelation which is quite subtly done that Amber is the Fool from the Farseer Trilogy. I had pegged her as another one of the Fool's race, not the Fool himself, but her re-carving of Paragon's figurehead and the later scene of her and Paragon and the wooden crown seems to establish that beyond a doubt. Till then, I didn't think they were one and the same person because their characters seemed very different: they just shared certain abilities.. So it is interesting to wonder where that goes in the next trilogy. ( )

Really loved this series though I must admit that I was less than thrilled with such a wonderful series ended the way it did. Althea's story-line had been solid through most of three novels - to leave her victim to such a stereotypical female heroine trope damn near breaks my heart. Though I realize that talking about rape was super taboo back when Hobb wrote the series and thus brave in its endeavor to illuminate real fear - it's now par for the course for authors to subject their female characters to the male reader's gaze and fantasies. Puke. A lot. I expect better from such a prolific female author. ( )

I considered calling in sick to work just so I could read this book without any interruptions. That's how good it is.
It is a perfect ending to one of the best trilogies I have ever read.
I didn't even know how attached I was to these characters until the second half of the book when everything went crazy.
The last chapter made me cry and got me hyped for the Tawny Man trilogy.

Edit: I need to write better reviews for these books on my next reread because I do have some issues with them, especially after rereading them. I have issues like paedophiles being presented in a good light for example (there is a character that is 20 and is after - and ends up with - a 13 year old girl). Before people start saying that "it was different in that time" about a fantasy novel, the fact that she is just a child and he is an adult is recognized in the text and other characters have issue with it. It's just sad that discussion went nowhere and was brushed off. I still love the books, but these things are very uncomfortable to read and I wish it had been addressed better. ( )

In the last installment of the Liveship Traders trilogy, Hobb cranks up the heat in this swashbuckling adventure to includes dragons flying around, war brimming on the horizon, and our main cast of characters discovering themselves with harsh lessons that leave them forever changed. 4.5 stars out of 5! ( )

Half-way through this book, I seriously doubted that Hobbs would be able to wrap up the story. Two-thirds of the way through, I started it believe it possible. In the end, she did wrap things up, and quite nicely too. Some of the story lines felt more abruptly finished than others, but for the most part, things were wrapped up pretty reasonably.

There are so many themes in this series that I want to analyze. One is the pain of memory and how it can keep people from being whole. This is represented most literally in Kennit and Paragon, but the pain of the two characters who were raped was also inline with this theme. (I am somewhat disappointed that the second character's handling of that pain was rather rushed and so diluted.) Another theme was the power and lack of power of women in a male dominated world, as demonstrated in different ways by pretty much every female character. While none of the story lines were surprising by the time they reached their culmination, they were all very different from the retrospectively-simplistic stories that I, as a reader, predicted early in the first book.
( )