Carey, Jacqueline - Kushiel's Justice

[oyceter]

I had thought previously that my remembered fondness for Carey's first three Kushiel books were because I didn't have as much taste when I read them, or other such insulting thoughts, partially based on how meh Kushiel's Scion left me.

Nope, not true. Still love the world, still love the over-the-top epicness of it, still love the strange kindness Carey has for her characters. This book thankfully hits those points, which I feel the first book missed -- there is lots of sex and sexuality and romance, there are larger-than-life conflicts and heroism, and there are lots of moments of grace. Also, amazingly, Carey makes the love triangle central to this book work for me. I suspect it's because all the parties are aware of the love triangle, and while there are some secrets being kept, they're really not very secretive.

Imriel continues to be emo in this book, but it worked better for me because people knew he was emo and called him out on being emo. I also like Dorelei and Sidonie very much (particularly Sidonie), so that made me happy. Also, I find I have a higher tolerance for people going off and deciding that they are In Love and it cannot be stopped when a) the people actually try to stop and b) their religion is based on the tenet that people should love as they will.

The thing that really twinged me about the book was the Yeshuites. In the prior trilogy, the Yeshuites follow Yeshua bin Yosef (aka, Christ), but are very clearly modeled after Jews. It bugged me a little when I read it back then, but probably not as much as it would bug me now. In this trilogy, we find the Yeshuites have adopted the cross as their symbol and are starting to take over things with armies, and wow, it really bugged me that they were modeled on Jews (Name ben Father's Name, speaking Habiru aka Hebrew, religious leaders being called "Rebbe" and etc.).

Anyway, will continue reading because of the brain candy and Sidonie and the acceptance of different kinds of sexuality and open relationships, but yeah. It bugs me.

Comments

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I've decided that Justice is one of my top three favorite books, EVER. And I wasn't that into Scion myself. It is more epic. I love the love triangle and how everyone tries their damndest to make the situation work, and how the consequences work. I love how the moral of the story really is, "Love as thou wilt," which I never really thought of in that serious a manner in the other books. Here it's deadly serious when they do and when they don't. Wow. Really impressive.

I loved Sidonie and Dorelei as well, and Imriel's being called on his emo-ness. (Also the bit where S is all, "You do know that all the girls at court are lusting after your emoness, right?" and he's all, "Um...no, no idea," and she's all, "I never got the appeal myself, and now look at me..." Okay, major paraphrase there.)

My one quibble, which would be the same as Avatar, really, is that it takes way too goddamned long for Imriel to get the hell home. But I can see her not wanting to suddenly brush over the toll a long journey would take on you, and being all, "one two skip a few, now we're back home" would do that.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I was very glad that Carey managed to balance both Sidonie and Dorelei and make them both very different without making either of them better. One of my pet peeves is women fighting each other over a man, so that was nice! And I liked Sidonie standing up to people and just in general how she has power and knows she has it.