Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Books And A Beat.
So, Confession Time. I haven’t read much of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work. I recall reading The Summer Tree about a million years ago. Okay, not a million; it was originally published in 1984. I recall liking it.
And… I read nothing after that. Oops?
I always loved the covers of his books when I saw them, but somehow the books never made it into my library book bag. Time passed. Rabbit holes happened.
A free copy of The Darkest Road recently made its way to my Kindle. Cool cover. (It’s an owl. I like owls!) I haven’t read it yet—but, as you probably gathered from my last Teaser Tuesday post, NetGalley had Children of Earth and Sky, and it was only available for a limited time, so…
Yeah, here I am, reading Children of Earth and Sky.
Slowly.
Part of that’s a Time Thing. (Don’t you wish you could buy time at the grocery store, right up there by the cash register? “I need another twenty-four hours this week, please.”). The other part of is because Kay’s writing style is quite complicated. There are a lot of clauses (and their accompanying plethora of commas). There are a lot of parenthetical remarks (kind of like this post). I find myself having to read sentences over again to understand them properly.
It’s distracting.
But… I think I’m falling into the rhythm now. I’ve gotten all the way to the 12% mark on my Kindle. I usually read through a book of equivalent length in a day or two, sometimes three. (It depends on the available time. Do you see what I’m doing with this?)
There’s a lot of setting information to take in (but no info dumps!) and I want a map printed and set out close by. There is a map included, but here we see one of the pitfalls of digital reading: I can’t stick my finger in to mark the page, then flip back and forth to try to figure out where everything is.
There are a lot of characters. And a character list at the beginning that I can’t put another finger in to mark the spot for more flipping.
Still… I am enjoying the depth of the setting. There are characters with story lines so different they couldn’t possibly cross. What, for instance, has the resentful new ambassador got to do with the orphaned, wannabe pirate raider girl? And what’s the duke going to do with the doctor? Or the artist? Of course, I must read on.
My Teaser
Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay
Genre: Fantasy / Historical Fiction
Publisher: NAL (May 10, 2016)
Find the Author on Twitter and Facebook
Available on Goodreads and Amazon
“It was also, however, a mysterious, dangerous, frightening city. And that wasn’t just about masks at carnival time or fog swirling about.”
~location 842 on my Kindle (12%)
Description
From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.
The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.
As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world…
Want to Play Along?
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
What are you currently reading?