2013 read #135: Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey.

Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey
700 pages
Published 2002
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This is a rarity: a middle volume in a fantasy trilogy that actually shows discernible improvement over the first volume. Many of Kushiel's Dart's weaknesses are still present, but they're toned down considerably. The game-of-thrones politicking still rests on a shaky grounding of vaguely defined, almost interchangeable tertiary characters, but whether through 1400 pages of exposure or some upgrade in Carey's descriptive faculties, I could tell who was who most of the time. There are still miraculous, absurd Hollywood escapes from certain doom, but there were only two or three such prodigies this time around; I lost count in the first book. There are still a number of glaring homophonic substitutions in the text, but Carey or her editors seem to have caught more of them before the book went to print.

Unfortunately (and here come some slight spoilers), this book's emphasis on Melisande as a villainous mastermind of the highest order exposes the fact that, really, Melisande doesn't have much characterization to speak of. She's exceptionally beautiful, yes, even by the standards of angelic half-breeds; she's a sexual sadist; she's brilliant and does the inevitable eleven dimensional chess thing, where she's always thinking ten thousand moves ahead of anyone else. And that's pretty much it. She has all the depth of a Goodkind second-string villain, which is to say, about as much depth as there is ketchup on a dollar menu cheeseburger. That's a flimsy basis for your series' central conflict-slash-conflicted love interest.

Chosen also has that most annoying of sequel tendencies, the exaggeration of a central character's trademark tic. In chapters that feature Joscelin, not a page goes by without him flashing and crossing his goddamn vambraces. And then when he's off-screen for the second half of the book, he has to go and teach that gesture to some poor suckers. Another sequelitis symptom: it's becoming evident, via repetition, that Carey is fixated on pushing her heroine into bed with Harlequin cover barbarians. That said, Kazan was a better character than Selig was, if only because "Balkan pirate prince" is a less exhausted racial cliche than "Germanic warlord."