Listen, I read a KJ Charles novel and I loved it. At this point, no one is surprised. If you want to know more details, keep reading.

I have a love/hate relationship with Dark Academia as a genre(?), subgenre(?), genremelange(?), Instagram aesthetic applied to a wide range of books from multiple genres??? Whatever it is, I see the appeal. I too am attracted to the nostalgia bait of autumnal quads, cramped dormitories, and dusty library stacks. I have an English degree. I am not completely immune to the propaganda. However, I am also intimately familiar with the flaws of universities as an institution. This makes a lot of “dark academia” books feel hollow and flat to me. You can tell it’s just a gloomy aesthetic and the writer isn’t actually wrestling with the flaws of the institution. It’s all just a rich Instagram filter with dark shadows and the distant sound of rustling pages and crunching leaves.

However Charles is not just any historical romance/mystery writer. She has things to say and she’s going to use this tragically romantic mystery about a university friend group falling apart to do it.

Setting 5/5 One thing I know is that KJ Charles always does her research. She’s a history nerd who loves tucking very specific details of the history and geography of the UK into her books. Death in the Spires is written from the perspective of a main character with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Oxford University at the turn of the 20th century and the specificity of the campus layout and building details really makes the book feel lived in.

The book also tackles the dramatic shifts in the social fabric of the turn of the century where centuries-long systemic oppression of the women, racial minorities, and the poor are finally starting to crack but not disappear. It doesn’t shy away from the bigotry oppressed classes faced at institutions like Oxford, even when they started accepting a lucky few into their ranks.

Enjoyment 5/5 I read this book in a 12 hour insomnia-induced haze. (Not the first time I’ve done this with a KJC novel…) I find her prose both easy and fun to read. Her pacing is excellent, and her characters are vibrant. Whenever I need a good pick me up, I know that a KJC novel will deliver, even if it is deeply sad.

Writing 5/5 I genuinely have no idea how KJC manages to have such well constructed prose while churning out roughly two books a year as an independent writer. Truly baffling. Her prose is sensual both in the literal and the sexy sense. In Death in the Spires it conjures the flash of golden autumnal life reflecting off the river, the musty mineral smell of centuries old masonry, and the grinding fatigue of chronic pain shooting through your body. I also really admire her ability to capture dialect and affect in dialogue in a way that feels natural, but is still easily comprehensible to a modern audience, including an American like myself.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD I will try not to get too specific but I do want to talk about some of the themes and execution of ideas in the Character and Plot sections that will hint at or vaguely reveal some plot points, so if you want to avoid any of that, skip ahead to the Overall wrap-up!

Character 5/5 I find it interesting that one of the conceits of the book is that Toby “collects” unique and controversial people to be part of his inner circle at Oxford as a way to show off how liberal and avant-garde he is; the token queer, black, female, and working-class students that would have otherwise been shunned. I think it’s a commentary on industries like publishing that often treat diverse representation as a checklist for virtue signalling but don’t actually care about supporting and fostering diverse talent pipelines that ensure that the stories of marginalized people are told with sensitivity and authenticity for generations to come. And these industries, like Toby, are just as quick to cut marginalized people out of their circle when they are no longer useful or easy to control. It would have been easy in a book as short as this one for some of these same characters to also feel like token representation. Yet Charles makes a point to write all of them with nuance and dimension. Each one has emotional depth and moral complexity that makes them feel like a character, not a checkbox on a list.

Plot 5/5 I am by no means a mystery connoisseur. I like it as a secondary genre, not a primary genre, mixed in with fantasy or romance, etc. So I’m not an expert in how one goes about constructing a mystery plot outside the bare bones of set-up, lay breadcrumbs but don’t be too obvious, and include one or two solid red herrings to keep the reader guessing. Make the answer to the mystery something that surprises the reader but feels perfectly sensible in hindsight. What I really liked in this book – and I don’t know if it’s a common trope – was the emotional red herring. It led to interesting thoughts on the nature of crimes of passion and crimes of avarice, of how what drives a person to commit a crime often matters just as much as the actual crime committed. Was the act done out of fear for your own life and a desire to protect those you love, or was it done just because you wanted something and felt entitled to it whether or not it harmed someone else? I think those are juicy themes to play with in the mystery format.

Overall 5/5 Nobody can hurt you like your college friends. College is such a strange time in your life where right as your adult identity is solidifying, you are shoved in, cheek-by-jowl with other equally horny, equally curious eighteen year olds, isolated from the rest of the world in a place where all you can really do is study, have sex, drink, exercise, and drive one another insane with vindictive, petty drama that won’t matter in five years.

And yet it is so easy to romanticize. You were young, full of energy, and still too innocent of how mundane adult life is. It’s the last period of semi-childhood where a lot of people let themselves dream big. It’s a time where you figure out who you are outside the confines of your upbringing.

Reading this book really captured both the nostalgia and the “thank god that’s over” feelings I have about my own college experience. 100/10, would never go back.

It’s a little odd, writing a review of the third book in a trilogy when I haven’t actually written a review for the other two. I feel like I’m writing more of a review of the whole trilogy rather than this single book. However, I’m going to try to stick to specific feelings about this individual book as much as I can.

Ship of Destiny (and the Liveship Traders as a whole) is a masterclass in classic epic fantasy. Robin Hobb exquisitely wove the storylines of a myriad of point of view characters into a complex tapestry that still feels like a coherent single story. Every character has depth and nuance, every setting is lushly detailed, and the entire world is so well constructed that it can leave even a seasoned fantasy reader such as myself with my jaw on the floor.

Also there’s pirates!

Setting 5/5 Hobb has a very specific ability to create worlds that are equally familiar and revolutionary to fantasy readers. She takes elements like dragons, prophecies, and animal familiars and breathes fresh life into them until they are nearly unrecognizable from the trope they started with. I don’t want to include too much detail for fear of spoiling important plot points, but I find her depiction of dragons particularly delightful and as creative as Anne McCaffrey’s famous thread-burning dragons.

She is also very good at creating cultures and political situations that are inspired by history without directly copying it. The rise of piracy comes straight out of the slave trade and resource extraction of colonization. Women’s rights ebb and flow over time and can vary greatly from culture to culture based on social and practical needs. And wherever there is a rigid social hierarchy and a leisurely ruling class, women’s rights atrophy to almost nothing. Colonization, even without the subjugation of an indigenous people, is an inherently destructive force that ultimately leads to decadence and the rotting of a colonial power from the inside out. It’s all trends one can see all over real-life history and yet she never copies historical events so closely that it is obvious where she is copying from.

Enjoyment 5/5 This book in audio format is over 33 hours long. It’s absolutely massive, and yet I finished it – on 1x speed – in eight days. By the time I got to this point in the Liveship Traders, I was fully hooked. I repeatedly had to stifle myself from ranting about what was happening to my spouse who is still only on Assassin’s Quest. Hobb was plucking at my heartstrings like a lute the entire time and I loved every second of it.

Writing 5/5 Rarely does a fantasy writer possess the trifecta of great world-building, great character work, and great prose but Hobb does. Her line-level prose is exquisite to read. There were multiple times while I listened to this book where I bemoaned the fact that I was listening to it and not physically reading it because the itch to highlight and annotate and really dig into the craft of what she was doing was so strong. This is one of the main reasons that I often pitch Hobb as “your favorite fantasy writer’s favorite fantasy writer” to people. She is a true master of every aspect of the craft and reading her books with a critical eye has made me both a better reader and a better writer.

Characters 5/5 One of the first things a fan of Hobb will tell you is how great her character work is. I could write multiple essays on the characters of the Liveship Traders alone, but I want to focus on specifically how gender roles and identity play a crucial role in characterization across the Liveship Traders. From the beginning of Ship of Magic, we already see that gender roles, and specifically expectations of women in society, are a stress point for the Vestrit family and for Bingtown at large. Every woman and girl in that family has a different conception of womanhood and their conflicts with one another often revolve around how those concepts differ from one to the other.

Wintrow as well has struggled with what it means to be a man across the trilogy. His father saw him as weak and effeminate, “little better than a woman.” His gentleness and desires to create, heal, and nurture are all seen as weaknesses. Part of his growth and coming of age becomes his acceptance of his own nature and ability to move through the world with a more grounded confidence that both his father figures fundamentally lack.

Then there’s the Amber of it all. I really can’t say much more without completely spoiling things, so I will simply say that she is my favorite character of the trilogy, probably the entire larger series. It was almost always Amber who made me have to put the book down and walk a lap around my house before immediately picking it back up because I was too full of emotions. She makes me screech incoherently and startle my spouse.

I think all this wrestling with questions of gender and women’s social roles set this story up for how successful it was in tackling the highly sensitive topic of sexual assault. While on page, visceral, and disturbing, I did not find it either gratuitous or callous. The assault was treated with both sensitivity and bleak honesty. And the aftermath focused on how hard it is for women who tell their story to be believed even by the people they most love and trust. It also depicted how men, especially those with immense power and social capital get away with sexual assault over and over again. It was terrible, but it was very well done and I think it had good reason to be in this story that is so much about gender roles and the struggles women uniquely face in navigating the world.

Plot 5/5 It is so hard to maintain momentum across a trilogy of 800+ page books and yet Liveship Traders somehow manages it. Even with the mind-boggling number of plot threads going on, I always felt like I knew what was happening, where people were in relationship to one another, and how each thread was interconnected.

Then in the second half it all came hurtling to a final, truly epic climactic even where all of those threads came together in a cacophony of cataclysmic events that literally shook the foundations of the Realm of the Elderlings. Truly, they rarely give writers the page count to pull off this kind of scale anymore and the fantasy genre is the poorer for it.

Overall 5/5 The Liveship Traders will break your heart in all the best possible ways. It is an absolute masterpiece of epic fantasy writing. While the Farseer Trilogy was very good, I feel like its in the Liveship Traders where we really see Hobb develop into the seasoned and groundbreaking writer that left her indelible stamp on the world of fantasy fiction. She is a generational talent that should be spoken of in the same breath as people like Ursula K. le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, and Anne McCaffrey. Anyone who tells you that this trilogy is a skippable part of the overall Realm of the Elderlings is doing you a grave disservice and you should not trust them!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m immediately off to read Fool’s Errand!