Reviewing Kushiel’s Chosen by Jacqueline Carey
Touring the Mediterranean, Sexual-Style
In 2024 I read Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey because I’d found it in a tiny free library. But really I read it because ads for the book had haunted me from tweenhood, twining alluringly through the pages of my mid-aughties Dragon magazines.
For those joining us midstream, a quick orientation: the Kushiel series charts the alt-Renaissance sexual and political escapades of Phèdre nó Delaunay, submissive to the stars in Paradise, France. Phèdre inhabits an Earth like ours, but not, in that all French people are descended from hot angels, one of whom is the son of Christ. For this reason, there are no Christians, but there are a lot of horny people who are all the better at being horny for the lack of Catholicism. Phèdre, divinely marked by Kushiel (the hot angel of redemptive punishment) as a super-submissive, learns to combine her natural gift for subbing and masochising with the skills of the spy’s trade.
Kushiel’s Dart is thrilling, sexy, adventurous, intelligent. In short, it is a hot date. It is also moderately pornographic and so I did not immediately pursue the sequels. I suffer under the yoke of self-consciousness such that I don’t like spending traceable money on erotic literature. I prefer to find secondhand copies for cash, gross as secondhand porn may sound. Why not think of it as well-loved instead?
I waited patiently these past two years with Phèdre-grade submission to fate, trusting the lively used book scene in my area and the fact that I live in the same state as Jacqueline Carey to bless me eventually. My faith was rewarded on June 1st with both sequels to Kushiel’s Dart for fifty cents each, and I plowed through book two, Kushiel’s Chosen, as fervently as Phèdre’s patrons plow--No, I shan’t.
Kushiel’s Chosen picks up where Dart left off: Phèdre has been taunted into returning to the sex-spy trade by the inimitable villain of the series, ultimate toxic yuri MILF Melisande Shahrizai. Phèdre’s boyfriend/bodyguard, Joscelin, takes this poorly and our leading couple enter a bit of a toxic relationship death spiral. Which is a shame, because Phèdre’s about to discover Melisande’s latest evil designs on the throne of Terre D’Ange (Angel France) and she’s going to need all the allies she can find…
Like Dart, Chosen is a shockingly engaging half-thousand-page book. Short, punchy chapters keep one zipping through Phèdre’s adventure, which this time spans the Mediterranean as she travels to Not-Italy, Not-the-Balkans, and Nope-Greece in pursuit of Melisande. There are riffs on the Medicis, The Count of Monte Cristo, and pirates, among other things. Carey bravely performs contortions of dialogue and credibility in order to include shibari rope work in her 1400s European setting. Surprises and delights of various stripes reveal themselves reliably. I burned through the final hundred pages in a furious rush, though I knew with certainty that Phèdre would survive, considering I already own Kushiel’s Avatar, which waits on my shelf for July’s international travel.
I appreciated the reappearance of some of Dart’s best supporting characters. Queen Ysandre acquits herself quite wonderfully, Admiral Quintilius Rousse remains utterly avuncular, and of course Melisande SLAYS. New characters charm and amuse, especially the hot but emotionally tortured Balkan pirate Kazan Atrabiades and the hot-headed but ultimately good-hearted Italian heir Severio Stregazza (obviously Phèdre has sex with both of them).
Joscelin is unfortunately still a drip. I have yet to lock in with Joscelin as he’s exactly your awesome friend’s boyfriend who’s bringing the whole party down. I understand his purpose and he does achieve several cool scenes by book’s end, but on the whole I do wish he would buck up. The most interesting woman in the world is in love with him and all he does is bitch about how she also wants to have sex with people who are willing to beat her up. Ladies have their needs, sir. Those needs don’t always make sense, but we must acknowledge them.
The D’Angelines as a whole exhaust me with their insufferable nature. As French people who are also the descendants of angels, they frame themselves as the hottest, most interesting people in alt-Renaissance Europe, which mostly comes out to having a lot of drama, a lot of very complicated sex, and affecting a pose of smug superiority in the face of every other type of person. They equate beauty and goodness relentlessly. They are shallow, self-obsessed aristocrats who can’t see past their own borders. As our first-person narrator, Phèdre finds herself constantly shocked by the rest of the world’s deviations from D’Angeline norms with the same tiresome degree of indignation produced by lifelong residents of NYC when they find themselves confronted by other US regional pizza variants.
What buoyed both of these minor irritants for me was Carey’s lightly but well-applied self-awareness. Joscelin is frequently and appropriately castigated for his dim-bulb behavior and repeated fumbles of the most interesting woman in the world. More compellingly, the new villain of the book is driven by a deranged fixation on D’Angeline blood purity which harms everyone around him and is soundly rejected by book’s end. When Carey seeks to show us an aspirational supporting couple, she orients us towards Ysandre and her Pictish husband Drustan, who is both visibly disabled and not D’Angeline. This is a comfort to me because it makes the great mass of annoying secondary D’Angeline characters feel bad and, unlike most erotica, it pushes against the absolute ordering of the world under the regime of normative-hotness-as-goodness.
Best and most ensorcelling of all, through this book and the last, is the completeness of our attachment and immersion in Phèdre’s person. Her viewpoint carries us through every adventure, her ever-energetic mind guides us through schemes and obfuscations, and her unique sensory experience expands our view of human pleasures. I am not, as a rule, interested in recreating any of the sexual acts described in Chosen. But because of Carey’s skill in rendering Phèdre’s sensations, I do understand what she gets from them and why she pursues them. I follow her competing desires to every crossroads moment and wait with excitement to see what she will do. I especially enjoy that she is not merely a badass who hits people, that she eschews violence whenever possible for better means. She makes willpower and composure look as hot and cool as they truly are.
At the end of Kushiel’s Chosen, Phèdre finds herself accepting the highest honors possible from her liege, surrounded by her friends and supporters. They assure her, in the loveliest way, that while she gets off on humiliation in private it isn’t the only thing she deserves, particularly in public life. Such acclamation is a stranger feeling to her than being broken on a wheel or tied up sexually, and so that sequence hit me harder than any of the sex scenes.
Whether in intimacy or creativity, tone management remains essential. Carey knows when and how to layer on the sincere feelings, the character clashes, the shocking twists, and the steamy encounters. Each element forms another link in the chain that keeps me bound up in Phèdre’s story. I hardly want to wait several weeks to break into Kushiel’s Avatar.
But I will. A little torture is good for the soul, or so the D’Angelines tell me.
