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i just finished rereading
Aug. 22nd, 2020 09:41 pmThe Lions of Al-Rassan, so here's my GoodReads review:
On reread, this book still has the same weaknesses that I find in all of Kay's works. It's pretentious in its portentous-ness (look, if you've read Kay, you know what that means and I'm sure you agree--I actually love that about his writing but I can't deny that he takes it too far), it has some weird gender stuff going on (Kay writes "strong" female characters but never seems to really understand women, probably because he sees them as inherently different than men), there is no subtlety in its attempt to be elegiac, there's some weird and unfortunate but seemingly unintentional race stuff (both your Muslim and your Jewish character have blue eyes? Really, Guy?), it uses the delayed information big reveal trick OVER AND OVER, and the story sometimes struggles beneath the weight of his style.
Despite all that, this book still gets five stars.
Sometimes the end product just transcends the weaknesses it contains and renders them irrelevant.
(And yes, I messy cried again.)
--
And I'll add this here, because it's my journal: I haven't read everything he's written, but even the stuff I love instead of being irritated to death by doesn't measure up to this book. Maybe I'll change my mind when I've read all of his books, but as of now: this is his masterpiece.
On reread, this book still has the same weaknesses that I find in all of Kay's works. It's pretentious in its portentous-ness (look, if you've read Kay, you know what that means and I'm sure you agree--I actually love that about his writing but I can't deny that he takes it too far), it has some weird gender stuff going on (Kay writes "strong" female characters but never seems to really understand women, probably because he sees them as inherently different than men), there is no subtlety in its attempt to be elegiac, there's some weird and unfortunate but seemingly unintentional race stuff (both your Muslim and your Jewish character have blue eyes? Really, Guy?), it uses the delayed information big reveal trick OVER AND OVER, and the story sometimes struggles beneath the weight of his style.
Despite all that, this book still gets five stars.
Sometimes the end product just transcends the weaknesses it contains and renders them irrelevant.
(And yes, I messy cried again.)
--
And I'll add this here, because it's my journal: I haven't read everything he's written, but even the stuff I love instead of being irritated to death by doesn't measure up to this book. Maybe I'll change my mind when I've read all of his books, but as of now: this is his masterpiece.
