Kushiel's Dart

One of my favorite series. She keeps the story going into the next series. It has some adventures, some fantasy, a heroine, and a well written story. Love it

I have loved this series for so many years! Very vivid descriptions help the reader picture everything happening. Highly recommend reading this. A tip for pronunciation, I treated it like the unknown words were French based.

This is one of my all-time favorite fantasy books, and the start of a truly wonderful, fantastic (in all senses of the word) series. It's been over ten years since a friend introduced me to Kushiel's Dart. I'm pretty sure I started it on a Saturday morning and didn't do much other than sit in my favorite chair with a cup of tea, and occasionally my cat, until I was done on Sunday evening. To say I couldn't put it down is an understatement; I was hooked from the very first page. I've lost track of how many times I've read it in the intervening years. Carey is a truly masterful writer - her storytelling skill is humbling and her use of language is gorgeous. I think I'd be content if I could write half as beautifully as she does. That doesn't mean her prose is unapproachable or dense, it's not at all. The narrative flows along smoothly and the points where the reader may be impatient for things to happen (and therefore, maybe feels that the narrative is slow) is on purpose, mirroring Phedre's impatience. So much happens in the space of this book - in all of the books, really - that a concise summary is sure to leave many things out. The book is told from Phedre's perspective, an adult narrating the events of her life, occasionally dropping small hints of things to come later in the story. Carey smoothly introduces us to a very young Phedre as a child in Ceres House and then leads us through Phedre's transition to pre-adolescence in Delaunay's house, her education as both a servant of Naamah and the "covert arts" (i.e. spy-craft), and her early career in both of those roles. Mixed into all of this is a skillful education for the reader about the world in which Terre D'Ange exists. When I first read Kushiel's Dart, I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the mythos of Blessed Elua and his companions - to be honest, it's just been too long to remember what my response was. Since that first reading, I've changed career paths and now am making my professional way in the (mostly) academic worlds of religious studies and gender studies. It's fair to say that I probably see the cosmology created by Carey in a different light now than I did then. This time around, I paid more attention to the cosmology woven throughout the story, and it was an unexpected pleasure to re-acquaint myself with that aspect of Kushiel's Dart. All of the gods, immortals, and spirits who exist in this world are so interesting, Carey's creativity here is another aspect I really adore. As with the world itself, the various deities and beliefs are modeled on traditions of Europe, the near and middle East, and Africa, so I tend to think of it as a parallel universe or a world-that-might-have-been in the pre-modern age. Except that instead of the Catholic Church gaining prominence, each nation or geographic region retained it's pre-Christian cosmology of gods, fallen angels, local deities, etc. It's just one aspect that makes Kushiel's Dart and the rest of the series rich and vivid narratives. My bottom line? I love this book and the series. Carey is one of my favorite fantasy writers and my appreciation of her storytelling abilities and creativity only increased reading Kushiel's Dart this time around. {review originally published on bookreviews.skriletz.net}