All the Seas of the World

“You always want a hidden staircase, he'd told his brother once. The world was too unpredictable not to have one.”

A random quote chosen for this one, but one that made me smile a bit reading. Everyone should have a hidden staircase.

I liked this one, but I didn't love this one in the way I've loved other GGK books I've read. I've read the other two in the series (A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky for anyone counting) and liked-but-not-loved those as well. The prose and themes are certainly there to enjoy that I know and love from his other books, but I thought the story being told was a little slow (even for GGK standards) and only drew me in at certain points.

We follow two characters throughout this book for the most part: Nadia bint Dhiyan a female assassin working through some personal trauma after being liberated from being an owned slave for rather unsavory people, and Rafel ben Natan a mostly-merchant, sometimes-pirate who helped rescue Nadia from her slavery and now employs her on his ship. There's also a whole host of side characters, some more important/repeated than others, that I won't get into because of how complex things can get quickly. Suffice it to say there's many points of view of this story, but the story itself revolves around Nadia and Rafel and what comes out of an assassination they perform right at the beginning of the book.

There's a ton of GGK-specific terminology in play here. While the story (and all of GGK's works really) is framed around a specific period of world history, there's always a slight magical bend to things that make them his own. It's not a direct 1:1 translation between Mediterranean history and the book, but there's enough similarities there for anyone familiar with the period to make connections. That said, though, I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first GGK book, I don't think, because of how little the book explains in terms of setting/worldbuilding. There's a large infodump period in the beginning, but you'd almost had to have read the other two books in the series to really get the most of it. There's also only the barest hint of magical realism in this book, so if you're looking for that dream-like GGK quality where things feel just on the edge of historical fiction and fantasy, you'll be a bit disappointed here.

All that said, I really did enjoy the book, and I liked the leadup to the ending. This is still a very good book for anyone invested in the A Brightness Long Ago / Children of Earth and Sky series, as many characters are either referenced or make a direct appearance. It's a GGK book through-and-through, and definitely give it a read if you're into his writing.