{"id":10089,"date":"2026-02-07T12:11:57","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T18:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=10089"},"modified":"2026-02-07T12:11:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T18:11:57","slug":"city-of-dragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=10089","title":{"rendered":"City of Dragons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ll start off by saying for the record that there will be spoilers for earlier books in here. Couldn’t be helped. So if you’re just here to know whether I like Robin Hobb’s third Rain Wilds<\/em> book so you can decide via my oh so timely intervention whether you ought to read it for yourself, the answer is I do.<\/p>\n

As of Dragon Haven<\/a>, all of the stunted, deformed dragons were successfully relocated. Also, the nice bird keepers really like each other, the musical elderling is having a rough time, the regular dragons remain completely self-absorbed, and that one guy from Bingtown who is a total dick is still a total dick. Thusly opens the second half of the series.<\/p>\n

City of Dragons<\/a> is about two things, more or less. The first thing it is about is exploring Kelsingra. Why do the dragons ancestrally remember this city so fondly? Does the fact that Fitz came here once<\/a> have any bearing on the plot? Too bad none of them can fly and get here, due to the implausible geography of a vastly wide river that is also constantly in flood, innit? (It’s to a lesser extent also about Thymara’s continued inability to come to grips with her sexuality. She’s still less annoying than Katniss<\/a>, to be clear.)<\/p>\n

The second thing it’s about is the plot’s slow but inexorable progression towards… comeuppance? consequence? confluence? simple climax? Honestly, given the characters involved, I think all of these things apply. In short and with no important specifics, there are a lot of characters heading to Kelsingra. Tarman the liveship barge with supplies, for example, or Hest the trader’s son with perceived privilege.[1] And I think that of the many characters headed in that direction, very few of them have the slightest idea what they’re sailing into. And I think it’s going to be pretty explosive. (Mostly figuratively.)<\/p>\n

Of course, this kind of thing can be problematic, cf some of The Wheel of Time<\/em>. So knowing the next book is the last one helps a lot towards not being extremely disappointed by a book that is more than half “moving pieces around the board”, as does my confidence that this is again the first half of a long book instead of actually two books, even if (happily!) the ending is a lot less abrupt than the first time it happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[1] For reasons that make no sense if you have somehow read the previous books but not this one, his scenes were among my favorites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll start off by saying for the record that there will be spoilers for earlier books in here. Couldn’t be helped. So if you’re just here to know whether I like Robin Hobb’s third Rain Wilds book so you can decide via my oh so timely intervention whether you ought to read it for yourself, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[106,1393],"class_list":["post-10089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-fantasy","tag-the-rain-wilds-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10089"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10102,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10089\/revisions\/10102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}