Well phooey. I wrote a review and it didn't save. Even that review was a bit rushed since I'm on vacation and just trying to get something down before too much time passes and what I remember of it is superseded by the fact that I'm already reading the second book. 
 First, this should not be the first Robin Hobb book that anyone reads. On the one hand, there's the fact that the main character(s) here have six huge novels of backstory before this volume, not to mention seven more books that fill out this world. On the other hand, I think this book benefits greatly from trusting the author. The writing here is beautiful, masterful, but the pace of the story is, frankly, more than a little slow. It's like a 500-page prologue that only ramps up in the final chapters (and appears poised to really get going in volumes two and three). However, having already been brought to tears by earlier volumes of Fitz's story, I can both appreciate the more mundane details in the context of Fitz's life and also trust that Hobb will bring it all together powerfully. 
 I'll just throw some more random thoughts under a spoiler tag: 
 (view spoiler)[I was bothered by how dense Fitz seems with regard to Bee. I know that we readers have an advantage of getting things from her POV, so we have even more clues to put it together, but everything about her is so uncanny that it just feels like Fitz should pick up on the fact that she's a White. Almost a two-year pregnancy? Bee's slow growth and then sudden development, he just seems to look past it too easily. I'm 2/5 of the way through volume 2, and I feel like even when it's obvious that Hobb is manipulating circumstances to prevent Fitz from making all the connections, those deflections at least seem more natural. And I say that even as an older father of young children myself, knowing how much energy they take and how they can fog one's mind with exhaustion and worries. 
 I was surprised by the Bee POV scenes, but I liked them. We've gotten used to the series being told strictly from Fitz's perspective with just the occasional alternate glimpses from the secondary sources that head chapters, but Bee's POV chapters let us see Fitz and the events of the story from another perspective, and I thought that was interesting and effective. (hide spoiler)] 
 I feel like there was more that I said in my first draft, but I can't recall what and I can't wait for my memory or this will never get posted.