TW: sexual assault

The third and final book of The Liveship Traders (and the sixth book in the Realm of the Elderlings series), Ship of Destiny finally converges ALL the plotlines and characters that were painstakingly established in the previous two, 900-page tomes. I stand by my verdict that all of these books are too lengthy and verbose, and focus too much on drawn-out conversations. But was it worth it? YES.

A lot of things happened in this final book that left me in emotional turmoil. First and foremost, there are all the revelations of Kennit, a character that I hated with a passion from the first book. He's a narcissistic, manipulative psychopath, there's no nicer way to say it. This book shows us why exactly he is how he is, sometimes even trying to make us sympathize with him and his tragic backstory. But by the time he

rapes

one of the main characters, there's really no doubt left about him. The

rape

is shocking in more than one way, because I felt it comes with a lot of

gaslighting and victim blaming

. I just wanted to scream at all these characters to

please just believe and listen to survivors

! Lots of tough topics to chew through here.

One of the most interesting hints this book revealed relate to the character of Amber. The book heavily implies that she is

the Fool from the Farseer books

. While I'm trying to wrap my mind around that, I now seriously would like to re-read all 2700ish pages of these three books to see where that was coming from, and if there are more hints earlier on. Needless to say I'm excited to start reading The Tawny Man trilogy next.

Altogether, while I struggled a bit throughout the first 1-2 books of  The Liveship Traders, I'm beginning to see why people say this is even better than the Farseer books. I don't think it's necessarily better. I really loved the Farseer books for their medieval vibes and the animals bonds. They are just two very different series. The Liveship Traders is overwhelming with it's vast amount of POV characters at first, but ultimately they all have their important place in the larger plot, and the character development is insane. A slow but great series, and I have a feeling we haven't seen the last of these characters (since there are 10 more books in the Realm of the Elderlings).