Ship of Magic

The Liveship Traders, Book 1

By: Robin Hobb

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships---rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. The fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia. For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy unjustly denied her---a legacy she will risk anything to reclaim.

For Althea's young nephew Wintrow, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard ship, Vivacia is a life sentence. But the fate of the Vestrit family---and the ship---may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider. The ruthless pirate Kennit seeks a way to seize power over all the denizens of the Pirate Isles...and the first step of his plan requires him to capture his own liveship and bend it to his will.

©1999 Robin Hobb (P)2010 Tantor

Critic reviews

“The characterizations are consistently superb.... Kudos to the author and encore!” ( Booklist, Starred Review)

The Best of The Best

This is my favorite Fantasy Book by my favorite fantasy writer of my favorite fantasy series.

This is a character driven book. The characters are all interesting. None of the characters are perfect and you love them all the more for it. Life is not fair and boy to these people find that out. If I have a complaint it would be with so much tragedy happening to these people, why can't Hobb give them a break every now and then. It is very similar to the character development in George R.R. Martin's books, only I believe Hobb does an even better job. It is interesting to see how people think of themselves and then how the people around them think about them and the surprise of some of them when they realize that they are not as well liked, hated, loved, etc as they thought. Each character in the book has struggles and you struggle with them. I can easily relate a lot of my struggles with the struggles of these characters. Hobb knows people and how they think.

The magic in this is different from most books, such as living ships. Hobb builds a different fantasy world for you, but there is no confusing time trying to get into the development of the world, you feel at home in it right away. It is exciting right from the start, no long periods of trying to explain the world to you. This is 35 hours long and there is not one wasted minute. (Read some of my other reviews and you will see I never go on about any authors like I do Hobb.)

I read the hard cover of this years ago and I am so glad audible came out with it. Some people claim they hate the narrator. I will admit that she has a different style, but I believe she is perfect for this book. I enjoyed this almost as much the second time around as I did the first. The only reason I didn't is that I already knew the surprises and the book is full of them. This is my favorite series of Hobb's and then is the Forrest Mage series and then the Farseer trilogy. Did not care much for the first book in the Tawny Man series and hope it comes out in audio, so I can listen to it. I have one book left in the Dragon Series, but the first two books were real good, so I am looking forward to listening to that soon.

If you can get past the narrator?

If you’ve listened to books by Robin Hobb before, how does this one compare?

Interesting primer for a trilogy.

What didn’t you like about Anne Flosnik’s performance?

I've read complaints about this narration and they're spot on its horrible. My only thought is that if you listen at 1.25 or 1.5 speed it's tolerable albeit she warbles a lot due to the nature of her slow drawn out reading

speed it up to listen

performance was annoying. I sped up to 1.20 and could tolerate it. The story was good although I did get tired of the spoiled teen angst.

Definitely have to be in it for the series!

If you could sum up Ship of Magic in three words, what would they be?

Slow start

What did you like best about this story?

The story starts slow-just like the farseer books, but eventually you get engrossed in the characters.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Narration left a lot to be desired-strange interpretations of many story points (too dramatic, or sad when the story was happy). An interesting accent as well-distracting for at least the first few minutes of any listen.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Nothing extreme

wonderful

when I realized that though this story took place in the same universe as the previous books but following a different group of characters I was wary however I was quickly pulled into the story. I deeply enjoyed this story, perhaps more so than the previous stories. the world building and research into relevant equipment was excellent and well displayed. the characters were so well fleshed out, well rounded and realistic with organic believable interactions. the narrator had decent pacing but poor tone and vocal range, often oddly drawing out words at the end of a sentence, yet still performed admirably.

Narrator is a bit annoying but good story

The narrator’s voice sounds like a women trying to speak in a high pitched low voice, that I found a bit annoying to listen to, trying to mimic what pirates are like. Also a bit monotone.

Put the narrator on 1.1 and all problems solved

I LOVE Robin Hobb and actually read these books a few years back but decided to start at the beginning of the whole realm of the elderlings series and just finished all the Assasins books. Switching narrators is hard and I for sure HATED this one for a while. I chugged through the first 10 hours then saw someone recommend speeding up the reading to 1.2. That was a little fast for me but 1.1 is PERFECT. No distortion, no strangely too slow narration. I was not enjoying her drawing out the characters voices soooo slow. The way she made them talk was not realistic. Speeding it up to 1.1 solved everything and actually made me enjoy her narrations for the rest of the book. If you love the story and don’t love thw performance, play with the read back.

Decent story terrible reading

I cannot listen to this narrator. Her way over the top voices take too much away from the story.

No Chapters or Times

The book lacks all information about chapters, total time, or time elapsed. Lost my place and never found it again.

Good

I like that Robin is able to keep the stories of the Duchies and Bingtown separate. Lite mentions lets me know this same arena.?
The narrator is good, she is able provide different voices during the story. My only complaint is that when she speaks softly is too hard to understand her.