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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
Good story - but the language used is a little too... something.
The first book of one of my favourite works of fantasy, a trilogy I feel is right up there with the Lord of the Rings, or close, anyway.
I like Guy Gavriel Kay a lot, but I sure as hell don’t like him when he’s writing isekai where a bunch of boring college students are whisked away to a fantasy land and have exactly zero emotional response to it. There is no excitement. There is no fear. No one’s even asking the appropriate questions about it, except for the one guy who gets magically left at the gas station for like two weeks and none of the others seem all that concerned that he’s gone. (#justiceforDave)
This book may deserve a little grace since it was Kay’s first and also from the 80s (during which the most of the fantasy genre was a lawless hellscape populated with He-Men and damsels and little else), but it does not make that easy. Our collegiate heroes have very little personality beyond sad, popular, other, girl, and girl 2 (with Dramatic Fate™ expansion), and none of them are curious enough about the world they’ve landed in to serve as a really effective cipher for the reader. (Even Kay’s normally lush prose can’t save us from a main character whose entire personality is “dead girlfriend.”)
I also feel compelled to mention that the book ends with a needlessly brutal scene of sexual assault on a character whose entire role in the story up to that point was to attend parties and get told how pretty she is, which is… not great. This is not an uncommon complaint for older fantasy works, but not one that I’ve felt the need to level at Kay in the past, despite the prevalence of sexual violence in his other books (what I’m trying to say is that the handling of this topic has improved dramatically as Kay gained experience as a writer, for which we can all be glad).
Even though I’m a hardcore completionist and in the middle of reading through Kay’s entire bibliography, I’m afraid I’m going to have to skip the rest of the Fionavar Tapestry. I dislike portal fantasy on principle, but I was holding out hope that one of my favorite authors could change my mind. I guess I’ll give him another shot at it when I finally get around to Ysabel.
This book may deserve a little grace since it was Kay’s first and also from the 80s (during which the most of the fantasy genre was a lawless hellscape populated with He-Men and damsels and little else), but it does not make that easy. Our collegiate heroes have very little personality beyond sad, popular, other, girl, and girl 2 (with Dramatic Fate™ expansion), and none of them are curious enough about the world they’ve landed in to serve as a really effective cipher for the reader. (Even Kay’s normally lush prose can’t save us from a main character whose entire personality is “dead girlfriend.”)
I also feel compelled to mention that the book ends with a needlessly brutal scene of sexual assault on a character whose entire role in the story up to that point was to attend parties and get told how pretty she is, which is… not great. This is not an uncommon complaint for older fantasy works, but not one that I’ve felt the need to level at Kay in the past, despite the prevalence of sexual violence in his other books (what I’m trying to say is that the handling of this topic has improved dramatically as Kay gained experience as a writer, for which we can all be glad).
Even though I’m a hardcore completionist and in the middle of reading through Kay’s entire bibliography, I’m afraid I’m going to have to skip the rest of the Fionavar Tapestry. I dislike portal fantasy on principle, but I was holding out hope that one of my favorite authors could change my mind. I guess I’ll give him another shot at it when I finally get around to Ysabel.
I had tried to read this many years before and bogged down but, while the audio version still started a bit slow, the last third of story was very compelling. The only problem with the audio is that there are so many characters and since it is a fantasy book most have somewhat different names. The narration was done by Simon Vance whose female characterizations were not great but overall did a fine job.
Great story, but I didn’t love his voice and words.
I read this series in high school and adored it, so I decided it was time to dive back into the world. I've read other Kay since, and I've liked every one.
Unfortunately, Summer Tree does suffer from "written in the 1980s" syndrome. Fantasy has just gotten SO MUCH better since then, as has Kay's writing (his recent stuff is phenomenal). It's VERY Lord of the Rings, with some Norse mythology thrown in for kicks. Humans, elves, dwarves, evil power vanquished and rising again, the whole nine yards. I really enjoyed Dave's character, but everyone else felt sort of interchangeable, and there's a whole lot of ancient lore that bogs the story down.
Still, I found myself being drawn in by the plot and the high tensions, and I genuinely liked the section with Dave and the Riders. The horrible rapey stuff at the end was really unnecessary (oh 1980s, I'm glad you're over), and I could have done without the friends letting their suicidal friend kill himself since it was for a good cause... ahem. Yeah. But overall, it had enough going for it that nostalgia won through.
I wouldn't recommend it to a new reader of Kay, because he has far better books, but at some point I will likely read the next one.
Unfortunately, Summer Tree does suffer from "written in the 1980s" syndrome. Fantasy has just gotten SO MUCH better since then, as has Kay's writing (his recent stuff is phenomenal). It's VERY Lord of the Rings, with some Norse mythology thrown in for kicks. Humans, elves, dwarves, evil power vanquished and rising again, the whole nine yards. I really enjoyed Dave's character, but everyone else felt sort of interchangeable, and there's a whole lot of ancient lore that bogs the story down.
Still, I found myself being drawn in by the plot and the high tensions, and I genuinely liked the section with Dave and the Riders. The horrible rapey stuff at the end was really unnecessary (oh 1980s, I'm glad you're over), and I could have done without the friends letting their suicidal friend kill himself since it was for a good cause... ahem. Yeah. But overall, it had enough going for it that nostalgia won through.
I wouldn't recommend it to a new reader of Kay, because he has far better books, but at some point I will likely read the next one.
This book had a lot of cool ideas and I wanted to like it a lot! I found it hard to tell when they switched characters, but that might have been the copy of the epub that I had! I liked a couple of the characters and it ramped up towards the end a lot in a dark way. I'll read the next ones but man I just need to take a pretty serious break from fantasy books.
The worldbuilding was nice and it had its good moments that's why it gets two stars instead of one. This book is not for me. If I wanted to read terrible scenes it should at the very least be from a bad horror book, not a fantasy one with a very lyrical writing style.