Rating: 
Summary: Great Book and Series
Review: Just finished book and already I miss Brashen and Althea and all the others. Hobb has restored my interest in series by tying up and finishing a great story. I cared about all the characters and the plot was excellent. Goodkind and Jordan could take a cue from Hobb and finish a storyline.Great read. Read her assasins trilogy if u haven't already.
Rating:
Summary: no complaints here
Review: In simple words ... reading robin hobb is pure entertainment. I was drawn in immediately to the farseer trilogy and because of that I picked up her liveship series. Want to get lost in a book...read Robin Hobb.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful ending to a fantastic series!
Review: I just finished this today on the subway, and I must say, it was a great read. While I might have a quibble here and there, on the whole, she delivered with her tale.Her world breathes in a way Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind can't come close to. She deftly handles a large cast of characters, giving each their turn on the stage. Of all the characters, perhaps Keffria and Serilla left me the least satisfied, but that is one of my quibbles. Hobb has rapidly ascended to the highest ranks of fantasy authors, which are few in my opinion. She, George Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles De Lint and Glen Cook (Black Company) are the best today. Jordan lost it long ago, and Goodkind is a simple hack who can't find his way around a story point. Read this book - you won't regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book Hobb bites off a little more than she can chew
Review: I have been a fan of Robin Hobb's since the beginning of the farseer trilogy. I have found all of her books to be truly enthralling and beautifully written. Ship of Destiny was of course no exception. The characters are all wonderfully detailed and believable. Most notably was Kennit woh I consider to be one of the best fantasy villans ever. However Hobb seems to try to do too much with her charcters in this series. For one thing there's entirely too many of them. Due to this most of the characters, while well crafted, recieve very little attention and the reader is left wanting to know them better. The only flaw in Hobb writing style is she is almost too detailed. She creates a world that is so detailed that no conclusion seems satisfying. This was true of both the farseer and live ship books. However whether this is a flaw or a merit is debatable. I truly loved this book. However it only recieved 4 stars purely as a comparision to the other 2 books in the trilogy. Had Hobb made this book a bit longer and made the conclusion a little neater it would have easily gotten 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: A conclusion that actually concludes.
Review: Ms. Hobb finishes the various story lines in a satisfying way, and resolves the various storylines. You can't ask for more than that, except that she does it with her great style and great story telling. The three books get better and better.
Rating: 
Summary: Shouldn't have been a trilogy
Review: I wanted to like this book, really I did, and I still think that Robin Hobb is the greatest fantasy author of all time, but there is a definite something lacking in the third outing of her Liveship Traders series. I gave the first book five stars, the second one four, and I'm afraid that this one only makes three, which is annoying because it had so much potential. We left the last novel with Malta floating down the Rain River in a sinking boat with the Satrap, the newly hatched dragon swooping majestically through the trees, Bingtown caught in the midst of a Chalced invasion, Paragon sailing down to take on the stolen Vivacia, and She Who Remembers finally free after leaving Wintrow close to Death's door. What followed needed to be good, nay, promised to be good...but it wasn't. And that is the tragedy, because the series deserved a send-off every bit as good as the previous two novels. With the exception of Selwyn's transformation which is, quite frankly, annoying, Hobb is the usual Hobb in this novel, painting her settings and characters with an almost unnatural perceptiveness that thrills and stirs as much as it moves. What is lacking here, however, is in the story line department. It feels like the author wanted this to be a trilogy, despite the first two books seemingly the first in a 'series' of books. Maybe she got bored, or wanted to move on to pastures new, I don't know, but the novel starts off by expanding from the opening point like a river becoming a delta, as in the previous two. This is all well and good, especially as regards the Satrap's exiled Companion Serilla, the youthful Old Traders usurping the elder Old Traders' rulings, the Old/New Trader civil war, Wintrow's blossoming relationship with Etta, the Chalced invasion, Amber's Fool-esque insight, and Vivacia's sudden change of character...but then it all stops. It reaches a point where Hobb seems to say to herself: wait, I don't want to go to a fourth book. And suddenly a number of channels of the story line are culled, without much build-up or foresight, and we are stripped down to the bare bones of the central story: Kennit, Vivacia, Paragon, Brashen, Althea, and a welcome re-emergence of Haven. The characters are then all brought together in a largely contrived situation, killed/saved nice and quickly, the outcome of the various nations is summarised briefly, and the novel ends at a point where it could easily keep going. It just sort of cuts, leaving you with so much more that you want out of the climax to such a fantastic series. I knew the characters, I felt for the characters, and I didn't want them discarded so haphazardly at the end. There are many loose ends (it would have been nice if the serpent situation was resolved rather than potentially resolved), and promising exploitative plot points are ignored to the detriment of the novel (Reyn's discomfort about the dragon's belief in mankind's abject subservience). There are, as ever with Hobb, a large number of plus points. Paragon's entrance into Divvytown, and the showdown between the Paragon and Vivacia are notable examples, as is Reyn and Malta's growing (distant) romance, but overall there is so much more that could have been done had this novel been allowed to flow into a fourth. Perhaps one day, as with FitzChivalry, Ms. Hobb will return to this world and give us more of what we want, but it is a heart-rending finale to an otherwise brilliant series that leaves you more disappointed than it does satisfied.
Rating:
Summary: Little fall-off from a high beginning
Review: With so much being churned out in the way of epic fantasy, it's always a pleasure to come across something original and unique. I felt that way about Hobb's Assassin books and wondered if she'd be able to maintain such high standards in this latest trilogy. While I don't believe she quite got there (it is after all a pretty high bar she set herself), this series certainly stands on its own as quality fantasy, and its final book is a fitting conclusion (though one wonders if that word has been banned from the genre). The basic storyline is both original and interesting, and she manages to avoid the typical banalities of genre fiction. Hobb creates characters far more often than character types and then flings them out into her world on their own or in various twos and threes. Best of all, her characters are often conflicted over their motives and actions, allowing for a depth of introspection seldom seen in the genre. And nowhere is this better done than in her main character Kennit, who alternately has the reader pulling for his success and hoping for his well-deserved comeuppance. It is a tightrope act she attempts with this character and I at least would have to say she pulled it off. It is tough enough to evoke an emotional response in a genre where characters all too often barely squeak into two dimensions, let alone three, but here Hobb swings for the fence in an attempt to elicity a multiplicity of responses. And she connects fully. Not only with Kennit, but with others as well. It takes a brave soul to attempt a character made out of wood; it takes an excellent writer to make me care about that character. Is the final book as strong as the first? I personally don't think so but it doesn't tail off much. Does the book seem rushed toward the end as several readers have commented? Without a doubt. Some plotlines are all too neatly resolved (one of her characters tries to make a distinction between "coincidence" and "destiny", but I wasn't buying it myself) and some characters' roles/personalities change a bit too abruptly, but in a work that spans three good-sized novels and a dozen major characters, these turn out to be minor complaints, far outshadowed by the quality of the story and especially the characters. She's two for two in series and I look forward to her next work--I wouldn't even mind if it's another multi-book "epic".
Rating:
Summary: great conclusion
Review: Good conclusion to a great series! Robin Hobbs does a phenomenal job in depicting her characters in this series, especially the villian Kennit who I almost feel sorry for at the end. Also, the tie-in character (I won't spoil it and say who) to the Farseer trilogy knocked me for a loop when I finally figured it out. (Didn't figure it out till about the middle of this book.) I look forward to the next trilogy!
Rating:
Summary: An engrossing novel..
Review: I found this novel to be a wonderful ending to a fabulous trilogy. I read through the entire book as quickly as I could, dying to know what happened next, but dreading to reach the end, for then I knew that I would have to part with the wonderful, well-developed characters that I had grown to love and hate. My only gripe with this book in that Kyle is disposed of a little too easily with little or no confrontation from Althea. I seriously hope that the author will revisit this area in later novels to check in on everything. In a nutshell, if you haven't read any of Liveship Traders novels, get crackin'! You are missing out on some of the best fantasy fiction ever to be written. If you have and are wondering whether "Ship of Destiny" is worth buying or not, let me assure you, it is!
Rating:
Summary: One of the best fantasies I've read in a long time
Review: I thought this trilogy started out a little slow, and stretched on a bit long during the first book. But, because I loved what the author had done with the farseer trilogy so much, I stayed with the series anyways. I'm glad I did. Kennit was one of the most completely realized villains I've ever read. I actually felt sorry for him, and it was refreshing to end a series on a note of regeneration and healing. My only complaint is that now I'll have to wait another year or two for Mrs. Hobb to publish her next book. I'm glad she's returning to Fitzchivalry - I thought the final one left too many strings hanging, especially for a chararacter I had come to care so much about.
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