There’s been a moment in each of the series within the Elderlings series books since the Farseer Trilogy where we see characters or  callbacks to one of the previous ones. A crossover of the core storylines which ties things together even closer than simply setting them within the same world/lore. City of Dragons offers the clearest of these moments in The Rain Wild Chronicles. At least so far in my reading as I’m just moving on to the fourth book.

 

Those links help strengthen my enjoyment of the individual books even as I’m already enjoying the progress of the core story and characters introduced at the start of this section of the series. It’s like when the spin-off of a long-running series welcomes guest appearances from the original. But, like good spin-offs where it’s done sparingly and in keeping with the plot and is just a welcome bonus for fans who’ve been there all along.

 

For this there’s a very small callback to Fitz as the dragon keepers find a place he travelled to through the skill stones in Assassin’s Quest. I was pretty sure it was the same place, and I loved the subtlety of how that was made certain by referring to the same broken window Fitz had noticed on his visit.

 

A stronger callback is made to the Liveship Traders books, unsurprisingly as they are set in the same parts of the world as the whole of the Rain Wild Chronicles. But, Malta and Reyn Khuprus and Selden Vestrit all enter the core plotlines of this book. It’s great to see how these characters have grown up, and their additions help to drive the maturity of this series forward, away from a standalone journey story to a central part of the Elderlings mythology and the vision for a world where dragons rule the skies again that the Fool has fought so hard for.

 

I continue to be awed by the effortless way the storylines and characters come together in this. I’ve had a few people comment on previous reviews that they’ve never read a Robin Hobb book because they’re not into fantasy fiction. I know it sounds daft because of all the dragons and portals and talking ships and telepathy, but I don’t think of these books as fantasy. They are simply facts of the world in which the story is told, it’s just a way of living you have to open yourself up to learn about as you read in the same way as you do for historical fiction or books set in a different country than the one you know well. It’s the way the story is told and the characters it is told through that are important, and Robin Hobb always offers an excellent read on both counts.