Unfortunately, this is definitely the weakest Robin Hobb book I've read so far. I was expecting to like it less than the glorious, 5-star previous trilogy, but I actually think I'm going to skip the rest of the Rain Wild Chronicles and read summaries online to get to the next Fitz books. This book follows five main POV characters. This works fairly well for the first half, when the characters are all in different physical locations. However once all of the characters meet up, we start getting the same scene from multiple different POVs, which feels extremely repetitive. Also, almost EVERY SCENE includes a flashback, often a lengthy flashback, sometimes to something that happened only the previous day and could have been told as present-moment action. This writing choice baffled me. It's something I can't remember struggling with in any of Hobb's previous books, but by the end it was driving me up a wall. The book also moved very slowly; the stakes feel lower, and the character far less emotionally true than in the two Fitz trilogies. Disappointing, but I will keep moving forward towards the next part of the series I want to read.