Kris’ Book Reviews

I heard a lot about Kay’s work, some bad, but mostly good things, and now it is time to write what I think of one of his books.The books story takes place on a Palm Peninsula, formerly divided into small countries, but 15 years before the main action of Tigana, the Palm was invaded by two sorcerers, eventually splitting the Peninsula in half. One of the sorcerers is Alberico a warlord from Barbadior empire, and the other is Brandin, the king of Ygrath.

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The main plot is about a group of people trying to overthrow the two tyrants, and freeing their homeland. Some of them come from a province that resisted Brandin the most, and eventually got wiped out from peoples (except the ones that come from this province) memory by sorcerers magic, so this is also a quest to regain the long forgotten name. There is also a love story plot between Brandin and a harem women from the Palm.

The world presented is similar to late middle ages, but with a portion of powerful magic thrown in. Besides the two great mages, there are also minor that were born on the Peninsula, and the interesting part is that if they want to increase their magic powers, they need to cut off their two fingers to tune into the magic pattern of the Palm Penninsula (which in fact resembles a hand without the two fingers).

The story presented is very interesting and entertaining, especially the conspiracy actions of the main characters, and the way they plot to remove the invaders. Book’s main figures are very well developed, and are not black-white, Brandin can be likeable, and the rebels are some times ruthless in their pursuit of revenge. The final scenes take you by the heart and are quite sad (a theme that will be repeated in next books by Kay).

I highly recommend “Tigana” to any one that likes fantasy and also to any one that wants to find out “what’s this fantasy thingy”. As a contrast to Lord of the Rings, this story is aimed to more mature readers (there are some sex scenes).

Rating: 8 out of 10

Buy Tigana: 10th Anniversary Edition

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 8:08 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.