Booklog 81/2024: Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel – Audiobook

[jacey]

Narrated by Kate Reading.

Ned, age 15, is in France, Aix en Provence, for the summer while his father, a famous photographer, is taking pictures for a new book. He wanders sround the cathedral one day and meets Kate, an American in Aix on a school exchange. They discover a strange and threatening man emerging from the vault, and from then on Ned is led deeper and deeper into a mystery which began over two and a half thousand years ago. At its core is the intense rivalry between two men, a Roman and a Celt, for the love of a woman, Ysabel. Their story is doomed to repeat through the centuries, one killing the other to claim the woman (always a woman plucked from the current time by magic) but this time it's different. Ned and his whole family become embroiled. The plot is gripping, the dilemmas suitably perplexing,  and the ending very satisfying. Poor Ned goes through the mill when he starts to dscover that he has some kind of second sight. There's a family rift between his mother and her sister which comes into play. Though the prose is lush and elegant there are moments when this slowed down a little too much. It could have been shorter and more succinct. There was a lot of running arround to no effect, which broke the rising tension. I still enjoyed it, but could have enjoyed it more had it been more compact.

Comments

[heleninwales]

That story sounds interesting. I've noted it on my To Read Next list. It feeling a bit slow might be partly down to it being an audiobook. If you're reading it yourself, you can skip more lightly over passages that feel a little superfluous, but of course the narrator has to plod through everything.

[jacey]

Yes, very possibly. I have been known to speed up audiobooks to 1.2% but in this case it didn't feel right.