Assassin's Apprentice

Suffer and suffer and suffer some more, for suffering's sake. Oh, and whine, and whine, and whine while you suffer.

Come on. I get it, “kill all your darlings” and “make your protagonist suffer the worst thing you can think of, and make him go through even worse” is always being told to authors, which is why a lot of books (but especially those in the fantasy genre) are so fucking cliched and infuriating to read. This book was the same. And it's exhausting and tiresome to just have people shitting on and hating the main character and having him suffer just to suffer. How miserable to read. I didn't necessarily mind the slowness nor the training scenes; but it was like Hobb didn't know where to go with the story and just threw in all sorts of plot threads before thinking, oh yeah let's torture the character some more.

According to Hobb's own system of reviewing (“books I like get 2 stars! why is everyone mad about that?!”), this book should get negative two stars from me.