Guy Gavriel Kay - The Summer Tree & The Wandering Fire

I suppose it's inherent in the nature of fantasy literature that it requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a suspension which, while it must always be willing in some sense, is positively demanded by the best examples of the genre. Still, the suspension will hold only for so long as the work itself doesn't break the spell, and the major failing of the otherwise excellent first two books in Kay's 'Fionavar' trilogy us that it's difficult to believe that the five figures from 'our' world who are drawn into the events in Fionavar can so quickly assume the heroic capabilities and roles that they do (particularly Dave, a basketball-playing law student who somehow becomes a great battleaxe-wielding warrior in the space of pages); the reasons for their willingness to just drop everything and go along with Loren and Matt in the first place are also not particularly well fleshed out. That said, those are more in the way of teething problems than anything else, and once the books get going, they're really rather good, if just a bit less detailed/panoramic than I tend to prefer.