This was not my favorite book by Kay but I still liked it a lot. The period and events described are difficult, the characters not always satisying, not always heroic, not always historically romantic and admirable, and the ending ambiguous, though clear enough for me. I imagine that made it much harder to write, and I give Kay credit for pulling it off as well as he did. Overall a bittersweet read, but still a very good one. I wanted to love this book, it had a lot of positives that I look for in Fantasy (interesting world that's approachable and not overly far fetched, engaging characters, even a strong female voice). It took me a while to get immersed with the story, the ffwd > rrwd pace was a bit hard to get used to and it took time to get into the characters. I think I was hoping to be as engaged as I was reading The Tales of the Otori, and didn't get there until over half of the book was gone. Hard to put my finger on just what I didn't love.
Do You like book River Of Stars (2013)?
More difficult to follow the characters at first but still very nice.
—may
Really interesting, and got me interested in Chinese history!
—kiana