Children of Earth and Sky

And this, I think, is where this book can either be pleasantly entertaining to the reader, or entirely irritating. Any reader who is fond of fantasy knows to expect some level of world-building ??? indeed, he or she may choose to make world-building an important criterion for judging the quality of a work (as I tend to do). This means, therefore, that readers who pick up Kay???s work expecting a second-world fantasy setting might find themselves surprised, and then maybe disappointed. It is one thing to derive elements from real-world cultures, or to include certain aspects of historical events, or even to create characters who share similarities with actual historical personages, but another thing entirely to take the real world as-is, and do nothing more than to change the names of places and people and shuffle historical events a little bit, and call that a ???setting???. Some readers hold this against Kay, saying his world-building is lazy, if it might even be called ???world-building??? at all. They don???t understand why his writing is called ???fantasy??? when what he???s technically doing is historical fiction. And I will admit, there is some merit to that complaint.

Full review here: http://wp.me/p21txV-wC