The Summer Tree (The Fionavar Tapestry, #1) in Beyond Reality

Nov 22, 2010 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: z-guy-gavriel-kay, fantasy-60s-70s-80s

this is a wonderful novel. it is hard to love at first. sometimes you get to know people who seem automatically awkward, whose social style is stilted, composed of quotes from movies or off-putting attempts to be clever, insisting on repeating tired tales, who seem eager to please yet incapable of easy connection. but you get to know them over time and those trappings fall away, the awkwardness fades and they become real, three-dimensional, a friend even. and so it is with The Summer Tree.

at fir this is a wonderful novel. it is hard to love at first. sometimes you get to know people who seem automatically awkward, whose social style is stilted, composed of quotes from movies or off-putting attempts to be clever, insisting on repeating tired tales, who seem eager to please yet incapable of easy connection. but you get to know them over time and those trappings fall away, the awkwardness fades and they become real, three-dimensional, a friend even. and so it is with The Summer Tree.

at first, it is pure template. The Lord of the Rings is more than an inspiration; tolkein's characters and themes and countries are all directly paralleled within. as such, it is often a very familiar novel and, just as often, that does not work in its favor. what becomes an equal problem is the staginess of the opening chapters and the awkwardness of the dialogue and characterization. both are rather off-putting and the novel starts out with a stumble.

but after that stumble...oh, the riches! what seemed to be trite characters soon flower into figures far more rich, fascinating, enigmatic, even iconic. their adventures moved quickly into the unexpected yet retained a richly mythic quality. the quality of the writing beyond the dialogue is striking: kay does not engage in lush description but rather chooses his words carefully, and the simplicity yet sophistication of word choice often made me pause, and read them again: a haiku of a tale, compared to tolkein's extravagant epic poem. the mythos itself remained entrenched in the familiar, but that becomes a virtue - at times it felt as if i was reading an original telling of these tales and a recounting of these myths, as if this were actually the original template, as if the tried-and-true depiction of celtic-flavored mysticism, the elves & dwarfs & trolls, the ancient powers and unending evils were being presented in their purest and most direct format. and its combination of modern (5 modern students cross dimensions) and classic (mythological kingdoms that are the true reality) becomes a delight - wit and sad wisdom doled out equally. i certainly was not expecting to read about one character's embarrassing hard-on; nor did i expect the tragic driving death of a loved one and the suicidal yearnings of that crash's survivor to become a touchstone drawn movingly upon during somber self-sacrifice. the two worlds become surprisingly and effectively intertwined.

the penultimate chapter is one of harrowing devastation and mortification. i'm not sure i've read such a terrible and horrifying episode of torment and despair, and one that wastes no time in excessive cataloguing of the indecent tortures visited upon a tragic character. the horrors depicted in this sequence are, again, mythic in scope and meaning, yet disturbingly modern in their ability to repulse and sadden. but at the finish, The Summer Tree ends on a hopeful note. just as i am hopeful that the remaining books in the Fionavar Tapestry will continue to impress and inspire. i can't to wait to read them! ...more

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Aug 31, 2008 Stephen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, mythstories-and-legends, 1980-1989, fantasy, unique-magic

5.0 stars. I just finished re-reading this book and was blown away by it. This is intelligent High Fantasy at its best. Gay Gavriel Kay is an incredible writer and his world building as fantastic. It is hard to be original in this well-worn genre, but Kay pulls it off and makes his characters and the world-setting unique and fresh.

Highly recommended!!!

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Aug 07, 2010 Kerry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reread, fantasy, 10-out-of-10, 2011

I've been wanting to read this again for so long, but I never was quite brave enough to do it. I had seen people who read it after reading later Kay, being unimpressed and I loved it so that I didn't want to risk that.

Finally, I had indeed read it again. And I loved it all over again. So much so that while I was planning to read something else after finishing it, I have moved immediately on to The Wandering Fire.

I can see why people who know Kay by his later works don't know quite what to make o ...more

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Jan 29, 2019 mina rated it liked it · review of another edition

Classic fantasy: An evil vs the world (general humans of Fionavar dan Earth, mages and sources, lios alfar, priestesses, dwarves, seers, spirits, wolves, magical forest, gods, [I think} unicorn, and some creatures that might have similarity with orcs or uruk-hai in LoTR). Book 1 contains an introduction to the characters who would be involved in the war againts the evil Rakoth Maugrim.
One thing's bothering me: in each part of a chapter, the author can go on for 1-2 paragraph(s) without mentioni ...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Edward Butler rated it liked it

The virtues of this book are such as to cement my conviction that fantasy novels about a War of Light and Darkness simply cannot interest me at all, because if any such novel was going to do it for me, it would certainly be this one, which is written with such care, intelligence, and feeling.

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Oct 21, 2010 Michelle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Beautifully written...

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Oct 06, 2017 Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sffbc, fantasy, ebook

I've tried and failed a couple of times with other GGK books that ended up having to go back to the library almost untouched, but this was on special offer, on my book club challenge list and only 300 pages or so with good reviews from people I trust. Should be a quick hopefully not painful read and hey-presto another one ticked off the list, where's the harm in that, I thought.

Well was I in for a surprise! Once I'd got used to the language of epic fantasy once more and relaxed into the wonderf ...more

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Mar 03, 2015 Sandi rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2015, audio, scifi-fantasy-horror-althistory

I had tried to read this many years before and bogged down but, while the audio version still started a bit slow, the last third of story was very compelling. The only problem with the audio is that there are so many characters and since it is a fantasy book most have somewhat different names. The narration was done by Simon Vance whose female characterizations were not great but overall did a fine job.

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Sep 24, 2010 Deedee rated it did not like it

Shelves: fantasy, locus-debut-novel, books-that-deserve-painful-death, mythopoeic-award-nominees, beyond-reality-fantasy, scifi-and-fantasy-book-club, scifi-and-fantasy-club-try-again

I've started this one 3 different times. Each time I tossed it for a different reason: (1) idiotic behavior on the part of the protaganists; (2) total editorial acceptance of the goal of the females to be limited solely to "becoming the girlfriend" or "being a good girlfriend" to the guys; (3) chasm-sized plot holes.

And .... what is Guy Gavriel Kay's obsession with the word "Shape"? Google has a way of counting words inside a book and it found:
Shape: 30 occurrences
Shapes: 19 occurrences
Shaped: 1 ...more

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Jun 02, 2011 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides rated it liked it

Shelves: used-to-own, fantasy-fiction

A re-read for a group discussion. It's a little hard to know what to say about this without spoiling the whole trilogy. So I'll say that it's the beginning of a trilogy that wowed me when I was a teenager and still getting into fantasy. It doesn't awe me as much as it did back then, but it's an interesting combination of Earth mythology and original creation. ...more

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