Words Like Coins [short story]

After slogging through a particularly dark set of books recently, I needed something clean and light. Robin Hobb is almost those things.

This being a short story, there wasn’t enough time for too much knife twisting, as occurs in her longer stories, so I dove right into her short story 'Words Like Coins"

This story is unrelated to the ROTE but does occur in that world. Making the ‘when’ of reading it unimportant. You can start here to dabble your toes in her writing style, or use it to cleanse your soul after finishing the main story. A bit of the hair o’ the dog to ease your feels. I also recommend her collection “The Inheritance”, (co written with her other Pseudonym) as a similar hangover cure.

One of the things that I show more enjoy about ‘adopting’ authors and reading most of their canon, commentary, and these days social media is you can see their self inserts, life experience, values, etc. Knowing that she has lived rough at times brings a truth to her description of such a life. Hauling water, building fire, preparing or even procuring food when there’s no grocery store. She writes authentically of the perils of mere survival.

This means that “Words” doesn’t need a quest, world shaking consequences or battles to matter. We care and are rooting for the hero of this short story because we know the ending that comes with failure.

I enjoyed it and can recommend it. show less

Words Like Coins is a short story set in the Six Duchies from Robin Hobb’s books. In this story, we learn about the mysterious pecksies. Despite its setting, this actually stands alone perfectly fine and doesn’t require any familiarity with Hobb’s other work to be enjoyed.

I’m not normally too crazy for short stories, but I really enjoyed this one. It caught my interest from the beginning, and I was especially interested after the pecksies started to show up. From that point, I was reading somewhat anxiously to find out what would happen. One can never really be sure just what Hobb will do to her poor characters, so I felt a little more suspense than I might have otherwise.

This was really good even though it didn't look like a story set in the Realm of the Elderlings. It felt very much like a fairy tale and the illustrations were quite interesting.
I wish the hedgewitch magic had been addressed more but I am happy with what I have got. Now if only I had a short story about Jinna and Fennel...

A quick Hobb short story / novella. Nothing spectacular, but it was Hobb, so of course I had to read it. Honestly though.. There's not much to say about it. I got excited when I read the blurb saying it was set in the Farseer world.. Thought there might be some connections to long forgotten friends of mine.. But nope. It's in the world, but disconnected completely from Farseer characters, which I expected but still sort of hoped to be wrong. Anyway though.. 3 stars.

Robin Hobb can write an epic 1,000 page novel just as well as she can write a 50 page short story.

Robin Hobb can write an epic 1,000 page novel just as well as she can write a 50 page short story.