This was my first book ever by Guy Gavriel Kay and overall I would say that I am just slightly disappointed. This mainly comes from pretty much only hearing good things about the author and also this in particular beforehand. But I think a lot of it is just a personal preference thing.

First of all I’m not that big on historical fiction (or history in general, I guess), so the setting of this being fictional medieval France is just not that appealing to me.

I also didn’t really vibe with the writing that much and feel like that’s what GGK gets most of his praise for. You can’t deny that GGK is very eloquent and elegant with his prose and a lot of the descriptions were quite beautiful but on the other hand it also felt too wordy to me sometimes and made a quite slowly paced book feel even slower. 

Beautiful writing is never a thing that can keep me engaged in a story by itself, so at points when the plot got less interesting or we had some characters that I wasn’t quite invested in I found myself drifting off sometimes which certainly is never great. That happened most frequently during the middle chunks of the book. I thought the first about 6-7 chapters were really good and then I also enjoyed the last like 3 chapters a lot. 

The plot in general wasn’t always great either. I thought it was pretty slow moving and also felt predictable at points. 

Worldbuilding-wise I thought this book was quite good. At its core we have two very different nations who are in conflict with each other and both of them are just being superbly realized, rich in culture (well one of them at least) and just interesting to explore. One country has this rich musical culture and especially all the songs that are being written add so much flavor to the worldbuilding and on the other hand with this very grim, misogynistic and militaristic country. And yeah just the culture shock you get from changing scenery is quite insane.

Save the best for last, I thought the characters were really well done. I especially loved the mercenary Blaise who even though this is a multi POV story I feel quite confident in calling the main character and I felt like every scene with him was just elevated but also other characters like Bertrand and Rosala were very compelling. 

So to quickly summarize this: It was a good book that got held back a little by the writing and the not always intriguing plot.