dmi3283's review
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
rixx's review
4.0
Hidden gem among early 90s Fantasy: In an Asian-inspired world, everybody has a kazuh: a talent, one of 52, that they discover and then hone to the point of genius, by entering a deep flow state. The protagonist, Kami, belongs to a family of acrobats, but clearly acrobatics are not his kazuh. This doesn't make him crippled or outcast or anything, he's just less good at some things than his father and his siblings.
Acrobats are slightly special in the rigid class hierarchy of this world, because while they belong to the peasant class, they play for and interact with the nobles – who can, if they want, have them killed on a whim. Fun. When a murder happens while they perform for a local noble, a standard mystery begins – but I'll forgive it for being a mystery, because it's more fantasy than mystery, and the worldbuilding is just delightful.
How about the fact that castle guards have to have a good singing voice, because guests are traditionally announced in four-part harmony (as are sudden alarms)? And seing traditional professions with their own kazuh, for example the smith, was just enjoyable and fun. Kazuh runners can run nearly limitless as long as their kazuh is raised (which, as any flow state, of course isn't sustainable indefinitely).
I'm not one for mysteries, and I tried to ignore the romance (not bad, just a bit YA-y), which mostly serves the purpose of driving class hierarchy home.
Overall an enjoyable light read. There's a second book to the series, which I probably won't get around to. No more than that – the series was not successful enough at first, and then the author died.
Acrobats are slightly special in the rigid class hierarchy of this world, because while they belong to the peasant class, they play for and interact with the nobles – who can, if they want, have them killed on a whim. Fun. When a murder happens while they perform for a local noble, a standard mystery begins – but I'll forgive it for being a mystery, because it's more fantasy than mystery, and the worldbuilding is just delightful.
How about the fact that castle guards have to have a good singing voice, because guests are traditionally announced in four-part harmony (as are sudden alarms)? And seing traditional professions with their own kazuh, for example the smith, was just enjoyable and fun. Kazuh runners can run nearly limitless as long as their kazuh is raised (which, as any flow state, of course isn't sustainable indefinitely).
I'm not one for mysteries, and I tried to ignore the romance (not bad, just a bit YA-y), which mostly serves the purpose of driving class hierarchy home.
Overall an enjoyable light read. There's a second book to the series, which I probably won't get around to. No more than that – the series was not successful enough at first, and then the author died.
edgeworth's review
3.0
Joel Rosenberg wrote a series of very fun fantasy novels I enjoyed in high school called Guardians of the Flame, which is basically about a group of D&D players who get transported into their fantasy world and find it’s not quite as much fun when your real life is at stake, and who also end up staying there for 25+ years and using their own college degree knowledge to kickstart an industrial revolution. It was a silly premise but very earnest and enjoyable, and I need to get around to re-reading it one of these days. D’Shai, on the other hand, is a more traditional fantasy story – one which is also a mystery, as the narrator and his family of travelling acrobats get caught up a tit-for-tat revenge drama while performing for a week at the court of a local ruler. (The blurb, shamefully, gives away a fairly critical plot development which doesn’t happen until the last fifth of the book!)
The key fantasy gimmick at the heart of D’Shai is the concept of “kazuh,” a form of magic in which the performer of a task – someone already at the height of their profession – can phase into a supremely focused and powerful rendition of that task, whether they’re an acrobat or a warrior or a runner or a cook or whatever. This seems a logical line of thought for Rosenberg, who (as I was reminded early in this book) is a writer with a lot of other hobbies who often writes about the physicality of certain acts: juggling, karate, guns, and in this book acrobatics. The most obvious example of this kind of writing was Hemingway, but you see it with lots of others, people who you can tell are channeling their love of a particular pursuit into their fiction: classic rock and baseball with Stephen King, mountain climbing with Kim Stanley Robinson, animal husbandry with John Marsden. I wish I was that kind of writer, mostly because I think it would be nice to be one of those people who can just lose themselves in an activity, even a mundane one like cooking. Instead I’m the kind of writer who’s an easily distracted scatterbrain and dislikes working with my hands, not because I’m lazy but because I find it dull.
Anyway, D’Shai is a light and easy read for a fantasy fan, the kind of book which would probably sit well alongside Barry Hugart’s Bridge of Birds. I suspect Guardians of the Flame is probably his better work, though I’d need to re-read that, because for all I know it doesn’t hold up.
The key fantasy gimmick at the heart of D’Shai is the concept of “kazuh,” a form of magic in which the performer of a task – someone already at the height of their profession – can phase into a supremely focused and powerful rendition of that task, whether they’re an acrobat or a warrior or a runner or a cook or whatever. This seems a logical line of thought for Rosenberg, who (as I was reminded early in this book) is a writer with a lot of other hobbies who often writes about the physicality of certain acts: juggling, karate, guns, and in this book acrobatics. The most obvious example of this kind of writing was Hemingway, but you see it with lots of others, people who you can tell are channeling their love of a particular pursuit into their fiction: classic rock and baseball with Stephen King, mountain climbing with Kim Stanley Robinson, animal husbandry with John Marsden. I wish I was that kind of writer, mostly because I think it would be nice to be one of those people who can just lose themselves in an activity, even a mundane one like cooking. Instead I’m the kind of writer who’s an easily distracted scatterbrain and dislikes working with my hands, not because I’m lazy but because I find it dull.
Anyway, D’Shai is a light and easy read for a fantasy fan, the kind of book which would probably sit well alongside Barry Hugart’s Bridge of Birds. I suspect Guardians of the Flame is probably his better work, though I’d need to re-read that, because for all I know it doesn’t hold up.
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