I really don't like saying this but if this was the first book in the trilogy, I would have read a hundred pages, put it down, and then never read another word by Robin Hobb. But the first book in the trilogy was good almost great, the second started the real downward spiral, and this third made getting ever worse into an art form. Boring fluff and endless repetition made me frustrated that I felt I needed to finish it. You could easily skip three out of four chapters of this book, and never feel you've missed anything. I wanted to give it 2 stars but that would have been a judgment on the series as a whole, as a single book this barely deserves 1 star.