panguitch's Full Review: Robin Hobb - Shaman's Crossing: Book One of the So...
I was 27 before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Five years later I'm wishing I could be something else. Life would be simpler if there weren't decisions to make. But even then you'd have to decide how to deal with those decisions that weren't yours to make.
Nevare Burvelle lives in a world where the order of birth decides a man's fate. First sons inherit their fathers' estates. Second sons are the soldiers. Third the priests, fourth the artists. Nevare, a soldier son, has never questioned the path the good god set before him. His childhood is spent preparing to serve in the King's mounted troops. His father spares neither expense nor hardship (on Nevare's part) to toughen and mold him into a soldier. And when Nevare finally enters the Cavalla Academy to be trained as an officer it seems his golden fate is secure: a position, a fiancé, and honor.
But Shaman's Crossing is a Robin Hobb book, which means Nevare is in for a lot more suffering than success. He is a likeable young man with insecurities and stubbornness that are sure to resonate, but what makes Nevare so compelling, after we have fully empathized with his aspirations, is the harrowing joy of watching him struggle through the destruction of all his dreams.
To be sure, Hobb is more merciful to Nevare than she was to Fitz in her Assassin's Apprentice. In fact, the ending, while not golden, is still rosy enough for the book to stand alone. But through five hundred pages Nevare squirms and we share his agony even as we're being gradually fed the pieces of a deeply realized world with conflicts and prejudices that mirror our own history.
The sections in the academy are reminiscent of many other boarding school stories. Nevare makes friends and enemies among both students and instructors and encounters naked politics and classism in ways that almost make the book seem like Harry Potter for grown-ups. But Harry never had it so bad, or at least no one can make you share their character's hurt like Hobb can. And the rift between sons from old noble families and those from new frontier families is richer and more complex than anything that can be encapsulated by the word "muggle."
I regret spending breath on this comparison because it only faintly rings true. From the beginning there is no whimsy in Shaman's Crossing. The first person narrative is slow, luxurious, and serious, reading like something written in the nineteenth century—fitting given the gunpowder, starched cavalry uniforms, and aristocratic manners that comprise the book's setting. Nevare's memoir-like introspections are laborious, but seal the reader to him as surely as he himself becomes sealed to the menacing, earthy powers of the tree-woman, who seeks to make him a tool to combat his people's expansion into her forest.
Like everything of Hobb's I've read, this is a beautiful book. It's not that her language is particularly remarkable, nor is it her world, which is more Austen or Tolstoy than it is Tolkien, nor the action, which is minimal. It's her characters that touch me like no one else's can. If you prefer pointy ears and slashing swords you'd best look elsewhere. But for my money Robin Hobb is the best author working in fantasy literature today.
Nevare Burvelle was destined from birth to be a soldier. The second son of a newly anointed nobleman, he must endure the rigors of military training a...More at HotBookSale
Nevare Burvelle was destined from birth to be a soldier. The second son of a newly anointed nobleman, he must endure the rigors of military training a...More at HotBookSale
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