Chipped Polish & Wornout Jeans

One of my goals for this year is to read one hundred books; Kushiel’s Dart is the first among them. I will be tracking my progress on GoodReads, and I am going to make a conscious effort to broaden my reading horizons. And now, without further ado, here is my first review.

I've read a great many reviews of this book, and many of them were very off-putting. They all said the same things; sex seems thrown in at random, the writing is repetitive, Phedre is a whiner, word choice is very poor. I will admit that Carey abuses the word phallus as if it is the only word she knows for male genitalia, and I also freely admit that Phedre was an initially whiny narrator who can get rather repetitive. The book does start off slow, as Phedre provides an information dump that lays out her parentage and explains the Houses, but once she reaches the age of ten, the story begins to pick up and move at a decent pace. However, none of this deterred my enjoyment of the novel.

I particularly liked that Phedre wasn’t your typical heroine; she isn’t a princess locked in a tower who picks up a blade to defend her home, and she isn’t a girl masquerading as a man in order to fight. From the beginning she is completely honest about who and what she is, and I loved that about her character. She is a woman, through and through; she is a courtesan, in a world full of finery and pretty that hides darkness. Behind the beauty and sensuality of her world and lifestyle lurks treachery and danger, and Phedre uses her wits and her skills to survive.

I thoroughly enjoyed the refreshing change of having a female protagonist whose sexuality and femininity was empowering and important; so often we see female characters tossing aside their femininity to masquerade as men or having their femininity treated as a weakness. Sexuality is rarely portrayed as a good thing, and there is often a great deal of shame thrust upon openly sexual female characters. Such is not the case here. Instead Phedre's sexuality is embraced and is in fact a powerful and important aspect of her character; having a hero who is a sexual masochist was daring, and I applaud Carey for being able to do so without turning Phedre into a slut. I was particularly impressed by the way that she humanized Phedre and showed both the positive and negative sides of her life as anguissette, especially when she was forced to become a bed slave.

The sex scenes were well done and were handled in a tastefully, though those that were graphic in detail are not for the faint of heart, Phedre's experience with Melisande and the flechettes for example; many of the scenes were simply fade to black, implying what took place instead of spelling it out in graphic detail. None of her encounters seemed thrown in for the sake of adding eroticism to the novel, and each served a purpose toward forwarding the story and developing Phedre as a character. Even her relationships with others, especially her companion Joscelin, are shaped by these encounters, and by allowing Phedre to be trained as an extremely keen observer, Carey is able to show us how other characters' views are shaped by Phedre's role as courtesan and spy.

Often with first person narratives, the protagonist is developed at the expense of other characters, but such was not the case here; through Phedre's keen observations we are able to learn a great deal about the individuals she encounters. Her friends and companions, as well as her teachers and enemies, were well developed, and because the reader learned about them as she did, the development felt more natural and less like an unceremonious information dump.

The world building in the novel is exquisite, and Carey creates a world of both beauty and  darkness; it is fairly obvious that she is building using Europe as a base, with her primary location of Terre d’Ange being based in France. A good world build is as important to me as good character development, and Carey does not disappoint. The D’Angelines have a rich culture with a religion based upon angels fallen from grace, all following an angel known as Elua; The central idea behind their religion is “Love as thou wilt” embraces sex as a spiritual act and not just a physical one, and Carey does an excellent job of handling this idea without turning it into a tawdry idea of sex everywhere.

I do wish to address what many have complained is the pedobear seal of approval on this book, in that children are accepted into the Houses at the age of ten, where they are trained to become courtesans. Do I approve of the sexualization of children? No. However, one must remember that this is a fantasy novel, set in a time period that harkens back the medieval period; children matured much faster during that time due to shorter life expectancies. Also, since the primary focus of the tale is Phedre’s journey it is important to remember that she is brought into the Delaunay house at ten, but she does not begin her training to become a courtesan until she is fourteen when she dedicates herself as a servant of Namaah; she does not lose her virginity until she is sixteen.

The novel was rich in detail, and while normally I am turned off by first person narratives, Phedre was an engaging narrator for the most part; she does begin as sort of a whiny brat, but as she matures, so does her voice, making her more relatable. The political intrigue can be very dense and hard to follow, and I found myself wishing I had taken note of which characters were enemies and which characters were allies. Kushiel's Dart is an engaging and lush novel, filled with intriguing characters and sharp plot twists and narrated by a unique and captivating woman who's emotional growth rings true.