After reading the brilliant Farseer trilogy (also written by Robin Hobb) i has really high hopes for this. The story delivers but i was still kind of underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong it is a rather good book but, still, pretty far away from the Farseer trilogy.
Highs:
- really really really good description of a family's problems and arguments and how money can split it up.
- good description of life at sea.
- interesting premise and setting.
Cons:
- way too many characters. I understood that, unlike Farseer, this wasn't suppose to be the story of a single character but, honestly, there are too many and it kind of detracts from the overall story. Personally i think Wintrow was, by far, the most interesting character and the only one of which i actually cared.
- i have found the ending a bit weak.
-it could have been shorter. From a story wise some parts could have been removed.

I'm back from vacation and ready to kick the tires. I got married last month (thank you, thank you) and then went on vacation in Paris (really beautiful city, lots of interesting things to see). Some pictures are here

Sometimes you can squeeze out a little performance from string handling by "interning" them. This is useful, for instance, when you create dynamically multiple strings with the same value. You can intern them by calling
String.Intern(value);