I can't imagine giving a book by Guy Gavriel Kay two stars and yet here I am. I had a lot of difficulties with this book, hence the nearly 5 years it took me to finish reading it. I did actually read it throughout the period, generally in bursts of a couple of days every couple of months while travelling.

Why was it a difficult read? It felt that GGK was trying too hard to make it a Chinese book. To me the text too often felt like Orientalism, the characters too inscrutable and Chinese so that, despite the omniscient third person narration, it was impossible for us to know their mind or their heart because one could not know the foreign. So many lines had the form and tone of a Burt Kwok epigram to the beginning of an episode of The Water Margin. I had trouble NOT hearing him read those lines.

Increasingly I also am bothered by courtly stories, whether Western or otherwise. The lives of "nobles" have no more to teach us of the human condition than the lives of others and an author choosing to tell the story of high nobility now seems like laziness or pandering.