Second reading (Jan 2017): Even more than I remember from the first time I read this, I was blown away by the emotional punch these books pack. Maybe because I'm older, I've felt more of regret and ties to family and responsibility, but there were so many moments that I found absolutely heart-rending, tear-jerking, amazing. In many cases, it's the payoff of six books' worth of character development. 
 First read (Sept 2005): This is the book in which I was immersed yesterday. Perhaps it's no wonder that I was so deeply immersed, considering that by that point I'd already spent over 4000 pages with the main character and his life (all told, measured in mass market paperback pages, I ended up spending 4152 pages with Fitzchivalry Farseer and the rest of them). If that sounds like a lot of pages, it is, but it didn't feel like it. These weren't books that I was trudging through because I felt like I should. If they had been, probably I wouldn't have. Instead, they were 4152 pages that I lived in and never really wanted to come to an end of them. When I have time, I'll be picking up Hobb's other series to read as well, because she's an author with power. 
 What is it that's so appealing about her books? I've said it before, but one aspect is the full, rich characters she offers in her novels. They're not just so full because she's spent 4152 pages on them--even from the first 435-page novel (Assassin's Apprentice) we had richness and depth. They're also very real characters. Sure, some of them wield magic and are at the center of plots whose resolution will shape the course of their world, but at the same time they deal with most of the same life issues that all of us face. They touch so deeply on the human experience that it's all very real. The fantastic elements of the story may elevate the situations to some sort of epic proportions, and certainly there's an appeal to that to, in fantasy and science fiction, that desire many of us have to feel that our life is important and significant, not just to ourself but to all those around us, even to the whole world and all of history. 
 Fantasy and science fiction play on that desire, but when that's all they do, they don't do all that much. Unless it speaks to our human drama, exploring what human life is all about, it won't touch us or move us in any really important way. 
 Robin Hobb's Fool's Fate (and, indeed, all of the other related books that have led up to it) does exactly that. In fact, that's why it's so long, clocking in at 914 pages. The big, epic quest that the book is ostensibly about is largely handled several hundred pages before the conclusion of the novel. But what it's really about is the life of our hero, Fitz. And that takes far longer to work out. 
 I won't talk about the plot really at all. You shouldn't read this novel unless you've at least read the two which precede it (Fool's Errand and Golden Fool) and I'd recommend reading The Farseer Trilogy (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassin's Quest) before that. If you do, you'll know long before you get to this book whether or not you'll want to read it. Want to? No, I should say you'll know before you get to this book whether or not you'll have to read it.