Angieville

Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted here at Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be an old favorite, an under-the-radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print, etc. Everyone is welcome to join in at any time! Guy Gavriel Kay (and this series) has been on my mind lately. I'm not sure why. I am sure, however, that the inaugural Retro Friday review was Kay's Tigana , and it makes me happy to have started with that book. But these are the first of his books that I read, and I read them on the recommendation of my husband (then-boyfriend). Which memory also maketh me happy. He'd read them years before and guessed (rightly) that I would love them, too. When I went to the bookstore to pick up the first book, the red trade paperback had just been released. I snatched it up and stroked the cover. It has one of those buttery matte covers that catch ever so softly on your fingertips and make it impossible to stop s...

DH is the one I have to thank for first introducing me to Guy Gavriel Kay 's body of work. He was a fan of the Fionavar Tapestry and felt sure I would like them. And like them I did. So much so that you will no doubt be hearing more about them at some future Retro Friday date. But for this inaugural edition I felt myself gravitating toward Kay's slightly later work-- Tigana . Originally published in 1990, Tigana is an epic romantic fantasy and was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award . First off, because I am an unabashed cover hound, a look at the changing cover art then and now: Kay prefaces his story with the following shiver-inducing passage from Dante's Paradiso : All that you held most dear you will put by and leave behind you; and this is the arrow the longbow of your exile first lets fly. You will come to know how bitter as salt and stone is the bread of others, how hard the ...