Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey

[goodreads]

Title: Kushiel's Dart
Author: Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 8/10
# pages: 901
Date read: January, 2009

Summary: The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassing beauty and grace. It is said that 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.

Phedre no Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet mote in her left eye. Sold into indentured servitude as a child, her bond is purchased by Anafiel Delaunay, a nobleman with very a special mission....and the first one to recognize who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one.

Phedre is trained equally in the courtly arts and the talents of the bedchamber, but, above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Almost as talented a spy as she is courtesan, Phedre stumbles upon a plot that threatens the very foundations of her homeland. Treachery sets her on her path; love and honor goad her further. And in the doing, it will take her to the edge of despair....and beyond.

Review: Good book, but I'm not entirely sure that it's quite good enough to span as many pages as it did. The story could easily have been told in fewer and still be just as good.

There are many disturbing scenes in it, and people who think Wizard's First Rule went overboard in pain/torture definitely shouldn't be reading Kushiel's Dart. Most of the time it served a purpose, but not always.

I still have to give it a high rating though, because it was engagingly written, though not quite as un-put-downable as I like books of that size to be.

Though it's the first book in a trilogy, it can be read on its own. There are some threads left hanging to be picked up in the next, but the main plot is sufficiently resolved that I wasn't annoyed by being left hanging.

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