Kay’s latest book gets four stars from one of my favorite reviewers. River of Stars is on my ‘next ebook I buy’ short list.
Category: Historical
Book Review: The Terror by Simmons (4 Stars)
Read in Feb/Mar 2012
I read The Terror as part of a group read at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club at GoodReads during the month of February. I participated in the discussion, as did many others. To review those threads, please follow this link.
I started reading this the evening of February 13th, with snowfall predicted to commence after midnight. I sat shivering at the kitchen table while I read the first few chapters, even though the furnace kept my house a toasty 78 degrees Fahrenheit. I even dug out a blanket to put on the bed before I went to sleep (still shivering). Brrrr….. Great writing by Dan Simmons, atmospherically speaking.
And I restrained my insatiable desire to research the quest for the Northwest Passage and specifically the final voyage of the HMS Terror until after I finished reading the novel. Simmons kept me riveted until the last few chapters, when he decided to take an extreme detour into arctic supernatural spirituality that left me, well, cold.
Still, a great read by an outstanding author. I recommend lots of warm tea or hot cocoa and abstinence from long pork.
Book Review: The Lions of al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Lions of al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Of the six novels by Guy Gavriel Kay that’s I’ve read, this and Tigana vie for my favorite of his work. How does he manage to make me care so much about his characters? And he creates a reflection of our world on the cusp of a rigid religious fervor scything inexorable destruction before it. A glimpse of the beauty crushed and the horrors perpetrated in the grip of zealous belief and political expediency. A lament for the loss of the previous generation’s glories and grandeur. A glimpse of the perseverance and grace of the survivors who rebuild from the ruins of wrath. An affirmation and triumph of love flourishing regardless of race or creed, persecution or circumstances.
Book Review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (5 stars)
Under Heaven
by Guy Gavriel Kay
5 out of 5 stars
Read in December 2010
Shen Tai mourns his father for over two years by burying the bones of the dead in a vast battlefield on the western edge of the Kitan empire. A backbreaking labor of grace daily and the company of the restless shades of soldiers nightly. He gains the respect of friend and foe and the attention of women in high places with influence, intrigue and power. The unfathomable gift of two hundred and fifty horses from a rival empire courtesy of a Kitan princes sent as tribute sets Shen’s life adrift on the high tide of potentially lethal imperial politics. He receives unlooked for and unlikely assistance from several women as he travels from the far western reaches to the very center of the Kitan empire in Xinan: a well trained assassin, Wei Song, sent by a former courtesan of the northwestern district previously known as Spring Rain and a former dancer now the favored courtesan of the emperor himself.
Even though we only ever see one of the famous Sardian horses for much of the novel, Shen repeatedly attempts to exchange them for knowledge of his sister and her rescue from the Bogu barbarians of the north, since his own older brother, now adviser to the prime minister, allowed her to be elevated to an imperial princes and sent as a tribute bride to the Bogu leader. But not even the most powerful players on this corrupted game board can assist Shen with his quest.
Kay delivers sweeping epic vistas of the open grass steppe and the heart-stopping gut-wrenching frenzy of court intrigue and rebellion. No other prose flows so seamlessly as Kays, completely engulfing me in the world he unfolds before me.
My only quibble with this novel, and which almost made me drop my rather to four or four and a half stars, was with the ending. Shifting to third person and a more remote historical sagacious point of view distanced me from the characters just as the story culminated and resolved. I still enjoyed the novel immensely, though, and highly recommend it.