June Books 28) The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay

[nwhyte]

I love Kay's later works, Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors, so I was prepared to be forgiving of this earlier work. It is a competent enough portal fantasy, with five young Canadians wrenched into a largely Celtic world to fulfill a variety of quests. There is some odd pacing of info-dumping, and the

Comments

[mizkit]

I read those books as they were coming out, and they still rank among my favorites ever, flaws and all. Augh. Now I want to re-read them. Because, you know, I need a good cry...o.O

[wyvernfriend]

I read that trilogy probably close to their publication, but before anything else by him which probably was the good way to do it!

Still re-read them occasionally

[lonemagpie]

Tigana and A Song For Arbonne are his best - if you haven't got the latter, you really need to.

[mizkit]

I have to re-read that sometime. It's the only one of his books I've bounced off.

[arwel_p]

I read those as they came out, too - must reread them again for the first time in 20 years or so. As I recall, they were quite decent, even if having one character named after an aircraft part was a bit distracting!

[nwhyte]

Oddly enough, Lois McMaster Bujold mentions that in one of the pieces in The Vorkosigan Companion, though without specifying what she has in mind (though there can be little doubt that she means this book and its sequels).

[arwel_p]

You might think Aileron's a High King, but I know he's just a wing flap!

[unwholesome_fen]

I hated this trilogy, and as a consequence never read any Kay again, although people keep saying that later books (e.g. Tigana) are a big improvement, so I might give him another try.

[kulfuldi]

Agree with you - except that I can't speak for the whole trilogy, just this book. I started 'The Summer Tree' last Christmas on the basis that many people recommended it, and found it so badly written that I couldn't finish it. I found the characters boring and their motivations unconvincing, and the portrayals of women just a bit sexist. And I couldn't see the point of the Canada/fantasy world shift since there wasn't much effort to play the contrasts between the two off against each other in an interesting way - the Canada prologue seems not to be very relevant to the story in the new world. Of course, this may change later in the book, in the bit I'm not going to read.

[unwholesome_fen]

Don't worry, nothing improves. If anything it gets worse, as you go through the process of "OMG, he's not really going to do that is he, oh he is, how predictable"... I only read the whole trilogy because I was running a group at uni that discussed various authors and he was up next, otherwise I'd have probably abandoned it during the first book too.

[coth]

When I read the trilogy on publication (1984-86)I found them genuinely moving, with some emotional highs (including and particularly Paul on the tree in The Summer Tree) that I remember to this day. They show typical new author traits of stereotypical character and plot, mixing in everything mythic and fantastic he ever read, but conveying genuine feeling with some superb, albeit uneven, writing. I remember that particularly noticeable influences included Tolkein (not suprising as Kay collaborated with Christopher Tolkein working on J.R.R.'s papers), the Thomas Covenant books, and Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain (whose plot and characters are essentially reprised