Kushiel's Chosen | Jacqueline Carey | Another Delightful Read

Kushiel's Chosen | Jacqueline Carey | Superb!!!

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Kushiel's Chosen

	Kushiel's Chosen Jacqueline Carey Tor Books, 2002 - 704 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Following hard on the heels of Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey's spectacular debut novel, comes Kushiel's Chosen, a glittering and riveting historical fantasy.

The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassed beauty and grace. It is said that the angels found the land and saw it was good, and the ensuing race that rose from the seed of angels and men live by one simple rule: Love as thou wilt.

Phèdre nó Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet mote in her left eye and sold into indentured servitude as a child. Her bond was purchased by Anafiel Delaunay, a nobleman with a very special mission--and the first to recognize her for who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one.
Phèdre has trained in the courtly arts and the talents of the bedchamber, but, above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Having stumbled upon a plot that threatened the very foundations of her homeland, she gave up almost everything she held dear to save it. She survived, and lived to have others tell her story, and if they embellished the tale with fabric of mythical splendor, they weren't far off the mark.

The hands of the gods weigh heavily upon Phèdre's brow, and they are not yet done with their charge--for while the young queen who sits upon the throne is well loved by the people, there are those who believe that other heads should wear the crown. And those who escaped the wrath of the mighty are not yet done with their schemes for power and revenge. To protect and serve, Phèdre will once again leave her beloved homeland.

From the sun-drenched villas of La Serenissima to the wilds of old Hellas, from a prison designed to drive the very gods mad to an island of immutable joy. Phèdre will meet old friends and new enemies and discover a plot so dreadful as to make the earth tremble, masterminded by the one person she cannot turn away from.

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Another Delightful Read

First, let me say that I loved this series, as it did something for me that few can. It took me about a week to read this book, which is fantastic in my mind, as I can blow through a book in 4-5 hours, usually.

That being said, I loved this sequel less than I loved it's predecessor because I just wasn't as sucked into the excitement. The characters were great, but I felt some could have been a little deeper, and the action was great, but I felt it could have been a little less frenetic.

Also, I missed Joscelyn, who gets my vote for best hero ever, hands down.

5 Stars: Action, adventure, romance (eventually), and my favorite characters. The whole series is just great.

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Superb!!!

These 5 books are the best series I've read in forever! An absolute must for avid readers. JC has enthralled me with her complex characters and vivid portrayal of a ficticious realm in all it's glorious treachery and betrayal. I could not recommend this any higher than 5 stars, but this whole series is in a class by itself. I woulld give it a 7 out of 5.

Avoids the middle-book blahs.

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen (Tor, 2002)

Carey's second Kushiel novel may actually be better than the first, which is a welcome change from the second-novel slump one usually finds in trilogies. Phedre and Joscelin have been living happily in self-imposed exile after the events of the first novel, but a traveler comes bearing a present for Phedre-- her blood-red cape. Melisandre is the only one who could have sent it, which means she's playing games again. And the only way Phedre can stop her, and prevent the crumbling of the empire, is to go back to spying. (Needless to say, Joscelin is not at all happy about this.)

For the second time, Carey has presented the world with a well-written, fast-paced fantasy thriller that looks like a doorstop but reads like haiku. The biggest problem with the book is that carrying it may prove cumbersome; it weighs in at seven hundred pages (in hardback), but once you're enmeshed in the story, they'll fly past faster than you'd think. (It took me nine days to get through it, while working and reading four other books-- two of which were also over four hundred pages.) The characters are very well-drawn, the action is almost nonstop, and the plot is sufficiently labyrinthine to absorb both the fantasy reader and the mystery fan. Very good stuff, this, for a second time. ****

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A little stale

I was a fan of Kushiel's Dart and was excited to start on the sequel. Unfortunately it didn't quite live up to its predecessor although it's certainly a perfectly readable book.

Kushiel's Dart had a fair number of things going for it that this book just lacks. I thought Phedre's lack of simple friendships or familial type relationships flattened out the character somewhat. In Dart she was a daughter of sorts to Delauney, a sister to Alcuin and a friend to Hyacinthe. By Chosen she's lost all of those relationships, leaving only her stormy on again off again romance with Joscelin. It leaves her seeming more one-dimensional. And the relationships that do remain--with Joscelin and Melisande went from painful and complicated to melodramatic and overdone.

I didn't much care for Joscelin or his pain in this book. I thought his struggle between his vows and his love for her in the first book were believable and compelling. In this book, though, I mostly found him selfish. It was Delauney who bound Joscelin to Phedre, not Phedre herself. She had no choice in his being vowed to her service, so it seemed a little selfish of Joscelin for him to expect her to order her life so he could remain true to vows she had no part in making. And it wasn't like she was returning to the Service of Namaah for kicks. She was doing it in service to the Queen. She didn't choose to be an anguissette either and often hates it as much as he does. He just struck me as being hypocritical and self-righteous. Phedre certainly didn't help matters herself, true, but he did annoy me more.

The Melisande business seems like it should have been finished in Book One too. Her whole love/hate relationship with Melisande was so unique and tragic in Dart. But it felt done with when Phedre gave Melisande back her diamond. Bringing Melisande back just felt like the author trying not to give up on her favorite villain.

The plot doesn't really go anywhere new, either, and we're introduced to too many characters who never seem to much matter. While I thought the political intrigue was a strength of the first, here I just found it slow.

The book does have its good points. I continue to like Ysandre and Drustan. And Phedre herself is a likeable heroine. Despite the fact that she repetitively gets accused of being a Mary Sue, I really don't find her any more unbelievably perfect than your average male fantasy protagonist, most of whom never seem to get accused of such things. If she's a Sue, so is Joscelin at the very least.

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Too much politicking.

Where as I can dig the intricate plotting and political intrigue this author has going on, Kushiel's Chosen was not as good for me as the first. Although the rescue of her beloved friend Hyacinthe is of vast importance to Phedra, this book really wasn't about that. Chosen is more about Phedra finding Melisande, the traitor who almost brought Terre D'Ange to war at the end of Kushiel's Dart, the first book in the series.

There is a thing as TOO much political intrigue however and, for me at least, this book had that in spades-especially for the first half of the book. Once Phedra and the boys left the courts of Elua for the city of La Serenissima in Caerdicci Unitas it picked up, thank God. (All places slightly familiar to us though given their own spin in this author's "alternate history" universe.)

Still, Chosen is bogged down with way too much information as far as I'm concerned and one has to concentrate to keep all the threads together.

Despite all the info- or perhaps because of it- I was as surprised as Phedra with where Melisandre finally turned up! It was a good twist and the fall out after made the book much more interesting.

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