Re-read the Assassin books recently afte revering them/Hobb as a kid. They're still good but I found plenty to critique this time around. Like, Fitz receives constant physical and emotional abuse from everyone around him but he remains ever loyal. It makes for exhausting reading at various points and his choices becomes increasingly hard to justify. Especially since those around him move on with their lives while he remains stuck: always agonising but ultimately never doing anything for himself. I also thought the antagonists were rather one dimensional haters, with not very interesting arcs.

Anyway! I don't mean to complain. These remain cherished books for me!

I just worked through them so it's a bit of a fresh wound. I wanted so badly for there to be a big satisfying payoff!

> Wonderful prose but man the storytelling was a disappointment.

If you're looking for quality prose with a confusing, hard-to-perceive story in the background, I can recommend Patricia A. McKillip. Most famously, I think, the Riddle-Master books, but most of her fantasy stuff is like this.

It's not so much that the storytelling is disappointing as that it's hard to understand what's supposed to be going on. But the writing style is something else.

As a followup, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber is a very short book, but it has some of the best writing I've ever seen. The story is not confusing, but it's nothing particularly special either.