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owlmoose 's review for:
The Summer Tree
by Guy Gavriel Kay
First, a warning: this isn't really a whole book, it's the first part of a book, and it ends abruptly, no closure whatsoever. So if that kind of thing bothers you, I highly suggest not starting it unless you have the second book in the trilogy close to hand.
That said, I enjoyed this book, although it's Kay's first published novel and it shows -- there are issues with the pacing and occasionally with clarity, and he jams a lot of characters and stories into a pretty short space. My favorite part was the section where he focused on a character who was separated from the others, because he was telling just one person's story, and I found it much easier to follow and get sucked in. The setting draws pretty obviously from Norse mythology (and I don't even know that much about Norse mythology) with a heavy dose of Tolkien thrown in, but there is enough original world building that it didn't seem like a ripoff, more like a way to make the world more familiar by incorporating stories we already know.
That said, I enjoyed this book, although it's Kay's first published novel and it shows -- there are issues with the pacing and occasionally with clarity, and he jams a lot of characters and stories into a pretty short space. My favorite part was the section where he focused on a character who was separated from the others, because he was telling just one person's story, and I found it much easier to follow and get sucked in. The setting draws pretty obviously from Norse mythology (and I don't even know that much about Norse mythology) with a heavy dose of Tolkien thrown in, but there is enough original world building that it didn't seem like a ripoff, more like a way to make the world more familiar by incorporating stories we already know.