Children of Earth and Sky

9/10
This book follows several major characters whose stories move together and apart like figures in a dance, but with rather more bloodshed than one’s usual cotillion. Still, Kay’s writing is as beautiful and lyrical as always, and the characters are unique and memorable, vividly bought to life (and death). I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves, as the author himself relates, “history with a quarter turn to the fantastic”.

Children of Earth and Sky Guy Gavriel Kay
Audio performance by Simon Vance
4 stars

Kay’s newest novel takes place in the same world setting as The Lions of Al-Rassan, but takes place centuries after the first book. Again, the cultural background mirrors actual historical events. This time he models the politics of Renaissance Europe; loosely, very loosely. The story is full of intrigue, great battle scenes, and much courageous action.There are also more fantasy elements than in Lions and there are some references to an earlier fantasy series that I have not read.

The book begins with a structure that Kay has used before. There are 4 main characters, 2 male and 2 female, who have extensive introductory stories, completely independent of show more each other. There are scenes set to inform the reader of the essential political conflicts. The four important characters come together in a scene of pivotal violence that changes every life. This is where the story structure changes. These characters are not stuck together by necessity or in a righteous common cause. They interact. Their paths cross and recross, but for the majority of the book there are several separate stories. I suspect this is what Kay fans will find lacking in this book. At first reading, I didn’t care for it myself.

But, then I thought about it some more. This is the fifth Guy Gavriel Kay book that I’ve read and I’m finding that he always causes me to think some more. That’s a good thing, and this book has much to recommend it.

Kay sets his books in cultures where women have a subservient role, but he writes wonderful female characters. His women are smart and far from passive. They have active roles in shaping the worlds they inhabit. But, generally, their roles are dependent on the male character they are attached to. This book is a bit different. There’s Danica Gradik, a young woman of Senjan, she isn’t just good with a bow, she’s lethal. She uses every tool she has to fight the people who slaughtered her family. She is the guard, protecting the men, not the other way around. Leonora Velari has little in common with Danica, but she has her own wounds to avenge. She’s very smart, makes the most of her few advantages, and refuses to bow to power. These female characters appeal to my feminist heart.

That is not to say that the male characters are unimportant. They are unusual men. In another role reversal, Pero Villani, the gifted artist, accomplishes more through the honesty of his art than others do with subterfuge, corruption, and violence. Marin Djivo, the merchant, is no coward. He is willing to take great personal risk for profit, but he will not betray a friend. He is also unaccountably patient in his love for Danica Gradik. The interesting thing about these two very different men is their attitudes toward the women in their lives. The story arc of this book is a bit different. It felt a bit strange. But that may be what happens when traditional roles are challenged.

It’s something to think about. show less

Life turns on a dime, shatters in an instant. A word spoken, or not spoken; a decision made or deferred. A decision made by someone else, someone in power, in another part of the city or in a city in another country. Rain or sunlight on a given day. Everything is precarious … but joy can still be found …

There is an immediacy to Kay's writing I haven't encountered … anywhere. There's no other author who can make my stomach knot up at a word, or an isolated sentence. An inopportune word, or a word forgotten. A character's decision to take this turn instead of that. A moment's inattention. If a stair creaks in one chapter, it will be important before long. And then he says something like "Then the big, red-bearded one said, changing show more her life, changing many lives …" and something's about to hit a really big fan. Foreshadowing in Kay's world is a heart-sinking thing, leaving me on edge with a knot in my stomach, because it's not going to be pretty when it comes to pass. Not. At all.

And the humor in the writing – so much of it, so unexpected still, wry and dry and bawdy and crude. It would be so predictable for a book featuring such drama to be weighty, but GGK makes me laugh as ofen as he makes me anxious. He's one of the best.

Children of Earth and Sky> features, like Tigana, another brother and sister, long separated. There are in fact echoes of several of Kay's other books, and oblique references – showing that his work all inhabits the same universe.
...
Words of wisdom from GGK:
Doing the right thing doesn't always save you.
and
Legends, if you crossed their path, could get you killed. show less

I describe Guy Gavriel Kay’s books as unhistorical fiction; he describes them as, “history with a quarter turn to the fantastic.” Either way, I find them compulsively enjoyable, full of vividly drawn characters—one of the most common quotes about him was that he never met a secondary character he didn’t like—with plenty of political intrigue and adventure thrown in.

For me, though, his work is all about the first item…the characters. I’ve said before that even second rank Kay is better than most others out there but, judging solely within his oeuvre, where I rank each of his books largely depends upon whether I find those one or two people that make me love them. In that regard, this is one of his better ones. Perhaps it show more doesn’t displace my absolute favorites, such as The Last Light of the Sun, but it’s up there. There was a wealth of them I ended up caring about.

As for the unhistory part: the place names might be different but there’s no trouble in discerning Renaissance Venice, Dubrovnik, Constatinople, Prague and Senj. I would say that, unlike most of his stories, I think there was quite a bit to be gained from having read some of his other books. So much of this book had the conquest of Constanti…err, Sarantium…as a backdrop that Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors made it much richer. Perhaps The Lions of Al-Rassan in the same vein, though less urgent.

One of his better ones. If you’re at all inclined to this type of book, it’s definitely a recommend. show less

Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is a story set in the same faux-Europe as the Sarantine Mosaic series, but after Sarantium fell to the Osman Khalifate.

A mixed cast of characters from various places around the Mediterranean meet on a voyage across land and sea, but this is very much a story of people rather than the journey.

I am an incurable fan of Kay's work. His lyricism, and his deep, seemingly endless love for humanity in all its frailty and confusion, create stories that compel every bit as much as any grand epic adventure. Fantasy does not require wizards, inhuman races, and evil empires to engage readers, for Kay understands that humanity itself is the core of every great story.

And this story is anchored indelibly show more in the humanity of its characters.

Throughout the various journeys in Children of Earth and Sky, we see how great things and not so great are influenced by simple human choices, but random chance, by things that no one can really explain. The characters question themselves, the world, and each other, yet still move on with the simple acts of living.

This is a novel of war without war, of human conflict and love and confusion. There is no evil empire, there is no real villain, simply people of character and conviction following the courses they have chosen, or have had chosen for them, until their ends. And the ends are the same for us all. Live goes until it goes no more.

I am not sure how to recommend a book like this, given that the basic function of fantasy seems so often to be excitement through adventure. This is not exciting, so much as it is compelling. The action is brief and mostly undescribed. There is violent conflict. There is spiritual conflict as well, and also lack of conflict altogether at times.

If an epic fantasy is sailing a great ship from origin to destination, this is a gentle float down a river. The river has its own beginning and end, but we are simply there in the middle, watching flotsam and jetsam tossed by the current.

Until the ride is over, and everything goes on without us. show less

I'm just going to have to place Guy Gavriel Kay's books into a shelf of their own. A genre of their own. I mean, sure, there are certain authors that have come close, such as some of Umberto Eco or Kim Stanley Robinson, but Kay's writing just plops us down into what, by all apparent aspects, seems to be our Rennaisance Europe or something very, very close.

All names and a lot of history is altered but to any normal comparison, we're dealing with the Ottoman Empire and Christians. Italy! A regular author might have just skimmed some aspects and thrown them in, but Kay instead goes deep and rich and detailed. Not only exploring all the misconceptions and prejudices on either side, but taking it full-force into spies, exiles, and intrigue show more of all kinds. And let's not forget the battles!

Lush writing, gorgeous characters. What's probably the best part of it IS the characters. I get into them not because of any particular plot point but because of WHO and WHAT they do, how they do it, and how interesting their choices twist the full story.

But what is the story?

Well, like the last one I read, the full culmination winds up being the WAY the lives are lived. Personal successes and failures. Not the overarching plot. :) I think it works brilliantly. Of course, I was invested in each character, so I would think that. :) show less

Kay writes exactly the sort of fantasy I like to read - personal, emotional stories set against the epic sweep of the world. In some ways, this book is the extreme of that. It's about how tiny an individual's life is against the forces - man-made and natural - that are arrayed against that life. How great a victory bare survival is. How magnificently worthy of celebration happiness is.

It's particularly about how much harder it can be for a woman to guide her own life. Strong women have always been a highlight of Kay - they are always there, they are always meaningful and rounded, and he often makes a point of the sorts of women's power that can be wielded in the periods he is writing about. This feels like the first time he has really show more shown, head-on and explicitly, the difficulty a woman can have in forging her own life, with her own choices. Two of the characters are fighting constantly to make their own way.

I found Danica's arc, in particular, to be very interesting. She has lost her family, she is angry, she wants vengeance. (These are common elements to the story; this is an angry part of the world.) She wants to fight, she fights. For a male character, this might be so simple a story as to be unworthy of telling, but because she's female, just achieving this goal requires her to fight every step of the way. Her gender is yet another of the forces arrayed against her. Her choices are hard.

But the book is also about how an individual's tiny choices can pivot world events. There's an almost KJ Parker-esque element to the small things that change everything, but no one does the one-line-changes-the-world scene like Kay, and he has some great ones here.

This takes place in the same world, and same part of that world, as [b:Sailing to Sarantium|104097|Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)|Guy Gavriel Kay|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1328000207s/104097.jpg|1336666] and [b:Lord of Emperors|104091|Lord of Emperors (The Sarantine Mosaic, #2)|Guy Gavriel Kay|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1386922916s/104091.jpg|2903660], and there's an added layer of resonance with references to the events of those books. Which only feels right and proper: everywhere in the world, what has come before matters for what is happening now (and why it is happening), but it feels particularly true of the Balkans. show less