Rise of a Merchant Prince is a delight to read. You know how in stories the soldiers will be facing certain death and will have the "what could have been" conversation? "I would have gone home and married that pretty lass" or "Oh, if only I could return and fulfill my dream of becoming a famous bard" or whatever. And you feel sad for a future that will never come.

Except, in Rise of a Merchant Prince, the "what could have been" actually gets played out! A character had goals, dreams, aspirations? Watch them live out their life! It's so refreshing. It's so real. It brings the characters to a different level of depth than their soldier martyr counterparts above. People live, people move on, and people keep striving towards their own happiness.

I found the second novel in the Serpentwar Saga to be much more affecting and full of humanity than the first. While Shadow of a Dark Queen was more thrilling, with higher stakes, Rise of a Merchant Prince manages to be interesting in a down-to-earth way, while maintaining the same level of quality as the first.

I highly recommend the series.

3.5
RTC

A filler book, aimed to build up to the following I suspect. Mostly about Roo and building his trading company, very minor movement forward on the war across the sea but mostly filler.

I fairly enjoyed the first book of this series. This one, however, was horrible. Let's put aside the pacing problems (something I can handle) and get to the two issues that bugged me. The lesser issue is the fact that Feist cannot write women characters. Seriously, every female character is either a sexual instrument or a pathetic weakling. They are only there to support the male characters. Even Roo's wife (a character who I started out really liking) turns out to be nothing more than a plot device. And the one possibly strong woman in the book is sleeping with at least two men; because, you know, sex makes them feel special.

The biggest problem I have with this is the main character: Roo Avery. He is not a strong protagonist. He is unsympathetic to say the least, and I found myself hating him more and more as the book progresses. He starts out well enough: deciding he needs to marry Karli. He doesn't really care about her, but he begins to see she's interesting and fairly intelligent (the author goes nowhere with Karli's knowledge about trading). After the wedding, however, Roo is so infatuated with making money that he could really care less what happens to his wife and his children (oh, don't get me started on how childish he acts when he finds out his firstborn is a girl). He later on has a mistress and decides he doesn't love his wife. He does multiple despicable things, and then at the end he has some immediate breakthrough and all of a sudden he's a doting husband and father. What?! The fact that Roo's overall story could have been told in 100 pages didn't help. I couldn't care less about the trading practices going on in Krondor (again, pacing issues). And now I'm supposed to CARE about Roo because suddenly he feels bad? Nope. Sorry. I found myself liking Roo's employees much more than liking him.

Continuing my progression through Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Cycle, this is the 11th of 31(!) books, and I'm happy to say I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Moving on from the events of the previous book, [b:Shadow of a Dark Queen|43908|Shadow of a Dark Queen (The Serpentwar Saga, #1)|Raymond E. Feist|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388212748l/43908._SY75_.jpg|1175877], Rise of a Merchant Prince shifts the focus from Erik and the war onto Roo Avery's attempts to establish himself as a rich merchant by whatever means necessary. This does seem, at the start, an odd detour, given the fact that an evil alien empire across the ocean is building an army with the goal of destroying all life on the planet, but I found it compelling nonetheless. I found myself enraptured by a scene in which Roo has to deal with a wagon, negligently driven by a drunken sailor, that's left parked in front of an important coffeehouse frequented by traders. Throw in a some well-written scenes in which Roo and his business partners decide how to best corner the futures market on grain, run-ins with the local Thieves' Guild, and a blood feud with a rival trading family, and you've got a strangely fun fantasy book.

Some readers might be put off by the fact that Roo is not an especially likeable character. He's a neglectful father and disloyal husband, with his focus entirely on his business empire. I was surprised that Feist decided to write a book with such a character as his protagonist, given that the previous 10 works were headed by pretty typical protagonists for the reader to root for. And I'm not sure if there was really anything interesting done with the fact that Roo isn't likeable. It was just an aspect of his personality, and nothing really came of it by the book's end. Maybe we'll see more character growth in the next.