Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by annakak
The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
2.0
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.