Note, this is a re-read of an 18-year-old book and I spoil it throughout from the get-go.
Guy Gavriel Kay’s award-winning novel, Ysabel.
The year was 2007. My world and the world of genre fiction were different. I was barely a reviewer in those days, not really published anywhere beyond my own blog as yet. YA and urban fantasy (often mixed together) were the hotness of the age. Rowling was still writing the original HP series and her hateful beliefs were not as well known. Pratchett was still writing, too.
And Guy Gavriel Kay wrote Ysabel and I read it. I forget if it was a review copy or something else, probably I just bought it back in the day. I had enjoyed a number of Kay novels at that point and was excited for something relatively different from Kay. What do I mean? Well, Ysabel is a strange book by Kay on a number of levels, and not what one might have expected. I enjoyed it, put it down, wrote a short review of it for my blog, and let it simmer in the back of my mind for a good long time.
Back to the present, I decided to re-read the book, in audio, in 2025 and give it another and considered look at it. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel is unlike every other book he has written. It’s a followup of sorts to his original Fionavar Trilogy, featuring two characters from that trilogy who show up in this one. This novel is entirely set in the modern world and in the present (Fionavar starts in our world but soon shifts us to the First World). The novel is overwhelmingly in its main protagonist’s point of view. Especially compared to his newest books, there are more outright supernatural elements in this book than usual.
And the novel has a teenage protagonist. Given that this was written in a highwater mark for YA fiction (and urban fantasy to boot), it doesn’t feel like so much that Kay was trying to ride the wave of a trend so much as taking a drink from that wellspring and seeing what he could make of it. In a way, the novel feels like an exploration of two subgenres at once, and a way to revisit a bit of the Fionavar verse at the same time.
So let me describe what a typical YA urban fantasy book would have done, and where Kay takes it in his own direction. Ned, our Canadian protagonist, is a track star and athlete and the son of a famous photographer. He and his father are in Provence, his father taking photos for the next collaborative book. Ned has some summer homework to do, and has to train, but he has a lot of free time on his hands. He meets a girl his own age, an American, and they have adventures together and some flirting, but nothing more. Ned and Kate stumble into the re-enactment of a myth and story and despite being warned about it, find themselves falling into it. Two spirits fighting and squabbling over the same woman (this has resonances to Marseilles’ founding myth). For plot reasons, while the two male spirits are in and of themselves, the female spirit needs a host.1
So you can see where this would go in most novels, right? Kate, our love interest, would get possessed by the spirit of Ysabel, the female spirit, and Ned would have to find a way to free her and dodge the two male spirits. That would be what you would expect, and back when I read this in 2007, that was what I was expecting. This was a highwater mark of YA and urban fantasy after all. And even in 2025, many authors would take that path.2
That’s NOT what happens.
But Kay teases us to the very last moment in a crucial scene that this is exactly what is going to happen. And in fact it looks like it is going to happen to Kate, but Kate is rejected in favor of someone else. Instead, Ned’s father’s hypercompetent and organized assistant, Melanie (coming at Ned’s call) is the one who winds up getting possessed by Ysabel and it is Melanie who Ned and Kate have to free from the grasp of this spirit before one of the two others (a “Celt” and a “Roman”) battle their way to a victory and find her, and claim her.
So now here is the novel veers off course, again. In a typical YA novel, Ned and Kate would NOT tell Ned’s father or anyone else (although an Obi Wan figure, Aunt Kim, shows up as mentor). The path more typically travelled would be Kate and Ned dodging her father, lying and dissembling what happened to Melanie and trying to work with Aunt Kim to find Ysabel/Melanie and try and reverse what happened, if they can. Again, back in the day, this is precisely what I expected to happen.
Instead the teenagers do the rational thing and actually go to Ned’s father and explain what they know. This does slow the book down as we get recapitulations of what has happened and more characters show up. Ned’s Mom, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders in Sudan (who does not get along with her sister), flies in. Also flying in is Uncle Dave, Kim’s husband. Dave and Kim accept what is happening; Ned’s father and mother are far more grudging in accepting the supernatural elements of the narrative Ned and Kate tell.
Oh, and now for the reader it is clear if it wasn’t already. Kim is Kimberly and Dave is David from the Fionavar Tapestry series. After those books, they got married and moved to England. They are still very connected to the spirit world, and Kim in particular can see that Ned has picked up that trait as well. The novel helps make clear something that I had missed in the Fionavar Tapestry books and I had missed on the original read—that Kim was one of those chosen in the Fionavar books because of her family history. This novel helps flesh that out.3
After a lot of low gear discussion which does drag on a little more than it should (something that is even lampshaded), the adults and teenagers can and do try and engage in the search to find Ysabel/Melanie before the Celt or Roman do. This gives us some more breakneck exploration of the Provence area, which for me as a traveler and photographer whetted my appetite for the area even more. Setting this book in a real place with real locations to visit does change the calculus of how Kay approaches location and setting. It’s again unique in a Kay book that he does this, here.
In a more typical YA fashion, while the search is conducted by everyone, it is indeed Ned who figures out where Ysabel must be, and as a track star/runner, is the one that must go alone up a mountain, and to get up to find her before the competition does. And so the final confrontation and the finale of the book can happen.
But leaving the summary of the plot, this is also a book about history and history of place in a way that many of his subsequent secondary world novels were and are but straight up. This novel has a deep resonance with Marseilles and the Provence region of France, and given the main character’s father’s photography career, that means Ned and the reader get a dime tour of a lot of the area. Even before Ned falls into that story that he is told that “he shouldn’t be in”, Ned is immersed in this time and place, and into the history of the region, going all the way back to Marseilles’ founding. A lot of the history though focuses on one slice of that history: Battle of Aquae Sextiae, 102 BC, where Marius, the Roman commander, defeats a force of Celts and Teutons that has been described as 100,000-200,000 fighters in size (Marius had maybe a third of that number at best). But it turned out to be a slaughter by the Romans. While the underlying myth and story that Ned falls into goes back further than that in history, this pivotal battle is what Ned has the most reaction to, and ultimately it is the history of this battle that provides the solution to where Ned must go.
Does the novel hold up today? I ripped through the audiobook in a couple of days of avid reading, but this was a story I had read before and wanted to consume again. And again, for readers who have not read Kay at all before, this is really a novel where he tried something different, something possibly irreplicable. There is practically a subgenre of fantasy novels that are Guy Gavriel Kay novels. If you have read 2 or more of them published in the last 15 years, you can see the outlines and know some of what to expect.. Often set in the same fantasy Two Moons universe, taking a slice of our history and turning it into the version in his world. (His two China books are in a different secondary world than the Two Moons books.) Deep historical resonances, and a willingness to play with the camera and see the fates of minor characters just before we leave them for the main narrative. Gorgeous immersive writing of those places. A poetry to the writing. (Kay is himself a poet and is often very interested in poets and creative writers, as minor or major characters)
Ysabel, for all of its features and joys, is not in that subgenre. It is a standalone sui generis Guy Gavriel Kay novel. The only major “problem” with the novel is, it makes me want to visit Provence more than ever. When I first read this book, I was still very new to taking photos. Having the main character be the son of a famous and avid photographer did not hit me as hard as it does now, especially when we share and feel, early on, his father’s obsession with finding compositions and light. While those parts are not essential to the plot and narrative, they establish his father, and they help establish the scene and locations and I, too, can now wish for such light, in visiting Provence. Even more than, say, the Sarantine Mosaic, which has instilled in me a desire to see Ravenna, this has instilled in me a desire to explore and photograph Provence.
I think the book is very worthwhile for Guy Gavriel Kay readers who haven’t gone that far back into his oeuvre, to see what his true range and experimentation leads him to do. For new readers to Kay, I hesitate slightly—this is a fine and fantastic book but if you are the kind of reader who wants to dive into an author’s work afterward, again, this is not the typical Kay experience in terms of just about anything except the love of history, and the quality of the writing. And it’s long enough ago that a lot of the Kay fillips are just not here yet. That can be a bug or a feature. And this is the only novel of his to win the World Fantasy Award.
I unreservedly think it’s a worthwhile book for many fantasy readers, today. I think for writers it shows ways to handle what would be a typical story and put very different spins on it. And it’s a book that not only bore and held up on the re-read, but immersed me into it all over again. It’s a book that, if you get it, and if you like it, it’s a book you can return to (and this audiobook was a good edition and a good production to make that possible). So in that way, it IS A typical Guy Gavriel Kay book, an author who bears and can bear the weight of re-reading, of reconsideration, of coming to again after years and rediscovering it anew.
1 Or is it that a woman is there and so a Host is used by the Druid character? There certainly weren’t any other backup women around, so if Melanie and Kate were not there, what would have happened instead? Melanie makes a walk between two fires to be chosen. I don’t think some random person somewhere off of the site would have embodied Ysabel. It’s not said, but I think the Druid decided on this approach this time for reasons of his own and thus it’s not the typical way this story spins out. (It is made clear this has happened multiple times over the millenia.) But the text doesn’t make my interpretation at all certain.
2 It occurs to me that one criticism of the book, perhaps unfair, is that Kay’s books are much more heteronormative than a reader in 2025 might expect or want. It also occurs to me that someone in 2025 who wrote this story may have gone for a queer relationship instead. A queer Nedra/Kate relationship with Kim mentoring and keeping it all from their parents, would be a radically different book.
3 In fact, it turns out in the denouement that Ned (and thus Kim) is a descendant of the original Ysabel. It’s a small but important bit and in an understated fashion helps explain that Ned didn’t “stumble into the corner of an old story” as he was told at the beginning. He’s been part of this story all along. He was fated for it. But Kay doesn’t put a gigantic sign over this, it’s something the reader has to work out. It’s this sort of small but intricate detail that really makes this book special.
