Children of Earth and Sky
27 February 2026
This was the first book I read by Guy Kay. Apparently his trademark is to write fantasy novels, but modelled off of real historical periods and places. In this story we jump between Seressa (Venice), Dubrava (Dubrovnik) and Asharias (Constantinople) sometime during the Renaissance. There is a war going on between the Jaddites (Christians) and the Asharites/Osmanlis (Muslims/Ottomans).
There’s a couple of different storylines going on here - Seressa wants to install a spy in Dubrava, and plans to send a doctor and a young woman pretending to be married to make it more believable. A young girl from the pirate town of Senjan tries to prove herself so that she can join her town’s raiding crew. A boy who was abducted as a child from the Jaddite side is now being raised as a soldier in the Osmanli army, lead by the Grand Khalif. Seressa also wants to send a second spy, a young artist, to go and paint the Khalif while also spying on him.
With all this talk of Seressanis, Senjanis, spying and different belief systems - honestly I found the first part of the book really hard to follow. I also didn’t even realise that there were parallels to the real-world until I got to the Acknowledgements of the book so I think that really didn’t help with me connecting the dots in my head either.
Once we start to get deeper into following the individual stories and you don’t have to care so much about the country-level politics, I found the book more enjoyable. Pirate-archer-girl Danica makes for quite a badass character, as does the doctor’s young wife, Leonora, who starts to come into her own as the book progresses.
The female POVs helps to offset the amount of sex that the characters seem to be having - it’s not explicit or anything, and maybe it’s realistic to the time period (and realistic with people in general). But if this was only a book about a bunch of dudes, and it kept mentioning their sexual escapades with the locals I probably would have docked a star or two (lol).
Speaking of sex, there is also a touch of romance, but I feel like it was not quite enough. The characters actually seemed quite indifferent to each other and would go about their lives before things would suddenly wrap up neatly with a “Oh, actually I think I love this person”, which was sort of nice, but not too satisfying to read.
Even with all of my nitpicks, this was a decent read! This is my first time hearing of Kay, but as a fun piece of trivia before beginning his writing career, he helped edit Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which was published posthumously in 1977.