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A review by blairconrad
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay
3.0
A good book, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I never felt the connection to the characters that I did with the earlier novels. I enjoyed reading every scene of Ren Daiyan's and most of Shan's, but I didn't feel like they were people in the way that I needed to. Some of the minor characters were more nuanced, and I felt more for them - Ziji in particular, and even a few of the throwaways, but that doesn't sell the story like it could.
Also, Kay's particular writerly habits are starting to grate on me - a little too much "he'd regret this later", and "this is why stories are important/different from reality". Oh, and something I never noticed before - a kind of weird sentence structure involving phrases spliced together with commas.
Still, at times I was eagerly turning pages to see what happened next, and I enjoyed the learning, as I almost always do. Definitely pick this up if you're running low on Kays to read, but I wouldn't make it your first.
Also, Kay's particular writerly habits are starting to grate on me - a little too much "he'd regret this later", and "this is why stories are important/different from reality". Oh, and something I never noticed before - a kind of weird sentence structure involving phrases spliced together with commas.
Still, at times I was eagerly turning pages to see what happened next, and I enjoyed the learning, as I almost always do. Definitely pick this up if you're running low on Kays to read, but I wouldn't make it your first.