You have different metrics for different writers. I’m an old man, I try to write, and I read a lot. Those combined make me a bit odd about how I read. I know workmanship when I see it, and I appreciate it. But for some authors, the bar is higher; you expect more.
My expectations for Guy Gavriel Kay’s fiction are the highest: Does he bring tears to my eyes?
Evoking an emotional response, causing catharsis: Kay does it better than anybody. The Lions of Al-Rassan, with two good, heroic figures, Rodrigo and Ammar, battling to the death, Ysabel, with an eternal love triangle which must find resolution, The Last Light of the Sun, and Torkell’s sacrifice for his son. Kay does it with vivid characters, set in great empires at the cusp of great changes, borrowed from and bearing the ponderous weight of history, but also redrawn as fantasy.
Children of Earth and Sky is set in the same world as Sailing to Sarantium and other of his novels, but later, contrasting the trading city-states of Seressa (Venice) and Duprava (Dupravnik, Croatia) to the Osmanli (Ottoman) empire, which is ruled from Asharia (formerly Sarantium (Byzantine Constantnople), now fallen to the Asharites.
The characters of this novel are principally from Seressa and Duprava but also from Senjan, a coastal city of warriors. Their personal lives are driven by their nationalities. There is love, loyalty, but also war, spying and murder, all spun around the lives of people who are thrown together from the pressure of states struggling with one another.
Bringing this cast together caused the book to start slowly, and I was convened early on that Children of Earth and Sky wouldn’t succeed in moving me as other of Kay’s novels had. But some reader patience was rewarded: once the forces propelling the book gained momentum, it moved with both inevitability and surprise to a very satisfying ending.
Highly recommended work from ‘the leading fantasist of our age.’