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Tiresome. Tedious. Repetitive. Populated with interchangeable, unlikable cardboard cut-out characters. The dialogue is endlessly crammed with discussions of fashion and parties and clothes and status-seeking. The action sequences either occur off-stage or crawl by at a snail's pace, and despite its name there's next to no sword-fighting in the actual narrative.

I have no idea how this became considered a "new classic" nor even how it managed to become identified as "fantasy." It's more like an alternate-history novel, set in a world devoid of the supernatural and which is a sort of melange of Renaissance France, Italy and perhaps Enlightenment Vienna. Guy Gavriel Kay does something similar, but in his novels the differences are substantial enough, and the supernatural apparent enough, to justify being identified as part of the "fantasy" genre. In Kushner's setting, the culture, the religion, the languages, etc. all seem like little more than vague and amateurish attempts at re-creating actual historical features.

The only "fantasy" elements about it are A) the way in which all the men sound and behave like women, and B) the fact that every man in this fictional world is less than a meaningful glance away from a homosexual romp (and naturally, none of the women seem similarly inclined to lesbianism). Ultimately, this read exactly like the sort of Harry Potter slash-fics my female friends used to write, in which Dumbledore and Snape and Harry and Draco and James and Sirius couldn't keep their hands off one another, yet somehow the female characters never seemed to engage in anything other than frustrated flirtations with their disinterested male counterparts. It feels like the rankest sort of stereotypical hyper-female wish-fulfillment, and the fact that the author is a woman at once does not surprise me and confounds me utterly.

So no, i was not a fan. And i suspect its "classic" status has more to do with the fact that it was one of the first "fantasy" novels to deal with homosexuality (cartoonish and adolescent though its approach might be) in an open, encouraging and frank manner, than any sort of value the book itself might contain. Indeed, THAT is the only sort of "swordplay" this book truly contains.

PS: I deeply regret buying both this book and its sequel. I have learned a valuable lesson about believing a book's hype.