Book Review - A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay
Book review of A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay When is historical fiction an historical fantasy instead? When there are two moons in the sky––that’s all you need. And every name––from the god ‘Jad’ to city of ‘Sarantium’––has taken a quarter shift to the left, but still, you know where you are. This is what Guy Gavriel Kay does, and he does it so well. I suspect there are writers who try to render 1500s Venice in a realistic way, but Kay does it better than most, and without calling it Venice. The freedom of writing near-historical fiction is that you can be absolved of all mistakes by the history police, while at the same time letting your characters participate in the story a bit after they’ve died, too. This works because the stakes are high, the setting is real, and the people are very human in troubled times. The troubled time in question takes place a couple of decades before Children of Earth and Sky , and the connections are hinted at but the st...