Has anyone else read the book?

[brigdh]

Oh, god, I hated this book so much.

The main character is so stupid that I don't know how he remembers to breathe. And I get it, I get the usefulness of it, that he has to have things explained to him and there's a plot out of him figuring out his mistakes and overcoming his illusions and blah blah blah; it's not my favorite trope, but I see why someone would use it. But this was unbelievable. Nevare would have all the necessary information to solve the problem, and yet would take hundreds of pages to put it together. Over and over and over again, until I wanted to smack him.

And Robin Hobb: what is your problem with fat people? See a therapist. Being overweight, even if you were massively obese (which I doubt Nevare was, since he was still physically fit enough to be chopping wood and digging trenches and whatever else), is not so disgusting that people would stop to stare at you on the street. Also, I don't know if you have issues with sex, or if you were trying to show that Nevare has issues with sex, or what, but it is really not appealing to have every single sex scene be either so passionless that I'm not sure why the participants even bothered, or described as "decadent lust".

On that note: Nevare's issues with women. WOW. WOW. Seriously, how on earth is he supposed to be sympathetic if he considers a mother who has occasionally traded sex for money to keep her children from starving to death a worthless human being? And in case you think I'm exaggerating:

I could not begin to sort the emotions running through me. I felt stupid and used; Amzil was only a whore, and even though I'd paid her fee in food, day after day, she'd never allowed me to so much as touch her hand. That wasn't a fair judgment and I knew it. She'd as much as told me that she'd sold herself for food when she'd had to. Doing what she must to feed her children; did that make her a whore? I didn't know. I only knew that hearing another man talk of it so bluntly made me intensely unhappy. I'd known what she was, I admitted. But until Buel Hitch had come here, I hadn't had to face that a lot of other men knew it, too, and far more intimately than I did. I had pretended she was something else, and pretended all sorts of other things about her as well. That she had a heart I could win. That she would be worth winning. That my protecting her and hunting food for her might make her something other than she really was.

*screams in rage at that next-to-last sentence*

And this is also a perfect example of what I mean about Nevare being an idiot. He's known about this for a month; that he suddenly now decides it matter to him is beyond stupid.

Oh, Robin Hobb. And I used to like your work so very much. What the hell happened?