In the god-touched, sundrenched land of Terre d’Ange, where people “love as thou wilt,” there is no one person with as significant a heritage, or as portentious a destiny as Imriel de la Courcel. His parents were the greatest traitors the land had ever known, his mother a master manipulator of the highest order. His adoptive parents are the land’s greatest love story: one an avatar of Kushiel, who finds pleasure in pain, the other a knightly warrior who left his order in the name of love. Imriel himself has had quite the life, stolen away and sold into slavery at a young age, forced to suffer all manner of degradations and perversions before he was rescued. Now he’s a Prince, third in line for the throne, and all eyes are upon him as he reaches his teenage years and begins to come into his own. But which way will he turn? Towards the throne, or towards the deceptive path of his legendary birth mother? Also faced with blossoming dark urges as his body matures, Imriel is at a crossroads, unsure of where to turn, and which path to follow. To that end, he leaves Terre d’Ange, determined to study abroad in as much anonymity as he can muster, so that he might learn how simply to be . . . himself.

Unfortunately, this new path leads into revolution, unrest, and war, as Imriel’s new friends come with some strange baggage all their own. From the scholarly courts of famed Tiberium, to the wartorn city of Lucca, Imriel will be forced to grow up in a hurry. He’ll be tested by the bonds of friendship, family, and love, and by the dictates of honor and loyalty, and in the end, he might just come away with a greater understanding of himself. Or he might find himself mired deeper than other in a game that runs beneath the political structure of the world, a pawn moved around the board by a cabal so secretive, even Phedre no Delauney knows nothing of them.

Kushiel’s Scion is an interesting continuation of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, and it greatly expands areas of the world not touched upon in the previous books. It explores the legacy of the infamous Melisande and the legendary Phedre, and it looks at how their entwined influences have created something entirely new. Imriel is neither saint nor sinner, angel nor demon, but a conflicted, complex, flawed hero in his own right, and watching him grow into his destiny and his own tastes is half the fun of this book.

I did find Kushiel’s Scion to be slow-going at points, hard to get into and rather dense in places. Imriel’s tendency to brood and angst is somewhat frustrating at times, making him less than ideal as a sympathetic hero. One starts wishing he’d stop with the inner monologuing, and just do something about the situation. Luckily, he’s surrounded by friends of exceeding loyalty, and allies of interest who make up for his shortcomings.

Oddly for the Kushiel’s Legacy series, this book takes a rather drastic turn into the supernatural/magical side of things about halfway through, when one character is afflicted with a fairly major change that lasts for much of the rest of the story. In general, this series’ claim to fantasy has rested more on the unique take on an idealized, alternate version of our own world, mixing and matching various historical periods to achieve the desired effect. (Terre d’Ange would appear to be something of a medieval-mixed-with-Rennaisance version of France, while their version of the British Isles is drawn from centuries earlier, invoking the era of the Pictish warlords. Tiberium is a take on Rome that seems inspired by classical Greece mixed with post-Roman Empire. Let me just note that as a historian, I’d make a great bicycle repairman, but there’s definitely this sense of mix-and-match going on, with each region in the series based on real historical settings, only strongly idealized to fit the story and the setting. Thus, we get something entirely new, yet hauntingly familiar, like a dream, and that’s where a strong part of the fantasy “feel” comes from in this series. Otherwise, what we’ve seen is limited to hints and subtle manipulations (save for the outright magical machinations and abilities of the mythical Master of the Straits) So to have such a blatant presence of magic in this book comes off as startling, to a degree, especially given how well the story works without the overt magical influences that most fantasies rely on.

I really did enjoy this book. It’s beautifully written, and the way Carey approaches many of the concepts and themes is quite well-handled, touching upon dark desires without wallowing in them. The book occasionally verges on erotic, but rarely does it go all the way into soft (or hard) porn like many recent erotic fantasies do. And for me, that makes it easier to take the actual story, that of a young man trying to find his own place in the world, a lot more seriously. Ultimately, I’d recommend this book to fans of the original trilogy, but I wouldn’t blame them for waiting for the paperback; it’s a pretty hefty read as a hardback. I’ll definitely check out the second volume in Imriel’s saga to see what happens to him next.