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A review by jandi
All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay
4.0
* Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada/Viking and Netgalley for an advance copy for review purposes *
It took me a while to finish this book, the pace is deliberate and the writing style begs to be savored rather than devoured. I also struggled a bit to get into this world, partly because I did not know this is a world the author has been building over several other books, but also because it is set on a fictional world loosely based on the Mediterranean around the Renaissance, and my mind kept trying to tie together the fictional places and characters to the historical ones (Florence, Rome, Venice, Marseille, Algiers, Tunis, Istanbul,...), pulling me out of the story. There were no fantastical elements of relevance to the story, so my expectations for fantasy were thwarted. Once my mind was able to make a peace with a world that is almost like but not quite like our own, I was able to get immersed into this book.
There are many beautifully constructed characters in this epic story. The two main ones, Rafel and Lenia, are a pair of merchants thrown into a life at sea after great losses. Rafel is an exile from Esperana, forced to leave his home as a child in an event eerily similar to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Lenia, initially known as Nadia, is a Jaddite (Christian) woman, captured in a raid and enslaved as a child, and now escaped and looking for revenge against any of the people of her former captors.. An ambitious contract way beyond their usual trading deals throws them into a whirlwind of action that shapes their world, and themselves.
The book explores the themes of religious identity, belonging and exile. Many of the characters are displaced and the path they are on was not necessarily their choice (specially for women and religious minorities).. Throughout the story, wandering characters encounter each other in different places and circumstances, with each encounter playing a pivotal role in the shaping of the world of that time. And I can see how breaking away from the real history through the different naming helps explore those themes without all the baggage that comes with them.
In a nutshell, I really liked this book because of its characters and lovely writing, but I found the quasi-historical setting distracting at first (it kept pulling me out of the story for the first couple hundred pages), and the random musings of minor characters on their death felt a little out of place. I would read more books in this world now that I feel more immersed in it, I am quite interested in reading the Sarantium books and anything where Folco d'Acorsi appears.
It took me a while to finish this book, the pace is deliberate and the writing style begs to be savored rather than devoured. I also struggled a bit to get into this world, partly because I did not know this is a world the author has been building over several other books, but also because it is set on a fictional world loosely based on the Mediterranean around the Renaissance, and my mind kept trying to tie together the fictional places and characters to the historical ones (Florence, Rome, Venice, Marseille, Algiers, Tunis, Istanbul,...), pulling me out of the story. There were no fantastical elements of relevance to the story, so my expectations for fantasy were thwarted. Once my mind was able to make a peace with a world that is almost like but not quite like our own, I was able to get immersed into this book.
There are many beautifully constructed characters in this epic story. The two main ones, Rafel and Lenia, are a pair of merchants thrown into a life at sea after great losses. Rafel is an exile from Esperana, forced to leave his home as a child in an event eerily similar to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Lenia, initially known as Nadia, is a Jaddite (Christian) woman, captured in a raid and enslaved as a child, and now escaped and looking for revenge against any of the people of her former captors.. An ambitious contract way beyond their usual trading deals throws them into a whirlwind of action that shapes their world, and themselves.
The book explores the themes of religious identity, belonging and exile. Many of the characters are displaced and the path they are on was not necessarily their choice (specially for women and religious minorities).. Throughout the story, wandering characters encounter each other in different places and circumstances, with each encounter playing a pivotal role in the shaping of the world of that time. And I can see how breaking away from the real history through the different naming helps explore those themes without all the baggage that comes with them.
In a nutshell, I really liked this book because of its characters and lovely writing, but I found the quasi-historical setting distracting at first (it kept pulling me out of the story for the first couple hundred pages), and the random musings of minor characters on their death felt a little out of place. I would read more books in this world now that I feel more immersed in it, I am quite interested in reading the Sarantium books and anything where Folco d'Acorsi appears.