Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. We’re still experimenting with the format, so just like last month, this month we’re just doing a review followed by your discussion in the comments!
Daggerspell (1986)*
Author: Katherine Kerr
Pages: 395 (paperback)
Publisher: Del Rey
* A note about my edition: I purchased a used copy printed in 1989. In 1993, the Kerr released an author’s definitive edition, which seems to be the only edition currently in print. I can’t tell what changed between the two, but the book does seem to be significantly longer (by about 90 pages) at this point and I’m not sure how much is due to new content and how much is due to formatting. If I talk about something you don’t remember or just plain didn’t happen in your volume, that may be why.
Why I nominated this for book club: Well, you see. Saint Patrick’s Day is in March, and I thought hey why not read a book based around Celtic myth and legend, and in my google for those kinds of books, this one kept popping up, and then people voted on it, so here we are.
Premise:
Even as a young girl, Jill was a favorite of the magical, mysterious Wildfolk, who appeared to her from their invisible realm. Little did she know her extraordinary friends represented but a glimpse of a forgotten past and a fateful future. Four hundred years-and many lifetimes-ago, one selfish young lord caused the death of two innocent lovers. Then and there he vowed never to rest until he’d rightened that wrong-and laid the foundation for the lives of Jill and all those whom she would hold dear: her father, the mercenary soldier Cullyn; the exiled berserker Rhodry Maelwaedd; and the ancient and powerful herbman Nevyn, all bound in a struggle against darkness. . . and a quest to fulfill the destinies determined centuries ago. Here in this newly revised edition comes the incredible novel that began one of the best-loved fantasy seers in recent years–a tale of bold adventure and timeless love, perilous battle and pure magic. For long-standing fans of Deverry and those who have yet to experience this exciting series, Daggerspell is a rare and special treat.
This book club discussion does assume you have read and finished the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, please finish reading before continuing!
Discussion:
Spoilers: I didn’t like this very much. Reading this book was a trial and a struggle, and it honestly baffles me that it has such a good rating on goodreads and regularly ended up on top ten lists for Celtic myth and legend. Unless this book is really among the best in that genre, which doesn’t do much to recommend it.
I didn’t feel passionately enough about it to hate it, so I think I just fall down around “tepid.” I have tepid feelings about this book. So let’s break it down.
First, there was the way that women were depicted. This book was written by a woman, but it was written by a woman in 1986. Jill, the leading lady in this romping adventure, is regularly slapped by her father, hard enough to leave a bruise marring an entire side of her face, and Jill’s response is to immediately stop doing what he slapped her for and obey him. Women are raped, women are treated as property, and, with one particular exception, women are assumed to be weaker and less than men.
But I was also intrigued by the depiction of women either trapped by circumstance (Brangwen), societal norms (Jill), and her own children (Lovyan). These women either fell to their troubles or found ways around them, but stayed true to the limitations of the time period and also exhibited at least some agency. Granted, Brangwen’s agency came in choosing her own death.
“If you set her aside”, Lovyan said at last, “I’ll make provision for her. At the very least she can come to me as part of my retinue, but I might be able to do better than that.” (Page 201)
I liked these parts, the bits where women exerted independent thought, where they realized how trapped they were in this unfair world and imposed their will and their effort to at least make their corner of it their own.
I also liked Jill’s character and voice. I liked the struggle toward the end for her, that it wasn’t the romance novel ending where they decide to damn the kingdom and marry anyway. I liked Lovyan and the way she at least attempted to maneuver around her eldest son.
That may have been all I really did like though.
I’ve seen books with multiple timelines done well (Cloud Atlas) so I know it can be done, but I didn’t understand the point of mixing them up here. We were given three glimpses into the recurring lives of these characters: the “present,” 643, and 698. 643 sets up the history and how the whole thing started, 698 gives one intercalary glimpse of how it played out in another lifetime, and then there’s the present, which, if these are normal years, is about 400 years after the first timeline.
If you’re going to mix up the timelines, why not show us more than just the three? Why, instead, give us 220 pages of a storyline involving a needlessly complicated plot by one brother, who isn’t even involved in this overarching story about their Wyrds, to disinherit his younger brother? This is the part I struggled so hard to read. I could not bring myself to care about Rhys. The denouement from the waaaaay too easy death of Corbyn and his wizard to the part where Rhodry and Jill stagger off into the sunset was excruciating.
And back to the overarching story, I wish this had been stamped with an incest warning label. Not because I would never have read it, but I would at least have been better prepared for . . . that. That said, I did like the way that story resolved itself. I reluctantly liked Cullyn’s character, how he struggled above his temptations and let Jill go when he needed to, not begrudgingly, but with grace.
My final question: why was Aderyn still alive 300 years later? Can’t be that he’s a dweomer, because Nevyn should have died at a normal time. And unless he has some kind of curse on his Wyrd too, there’s no reason he should still be around. If this is an entirely different person, why give him the same name and then never bother explaining why? This book left a lot up to guess work and I just didn’t feel like doing the heavy lifting.
In conclusion: I have trouble believing this book launched a fifteen book series. Even though I’m left with the mystery of who exactly Nevyn was feeling in the distance, I feel absolutely no push to see what happens next.
I liked the book more than you did, but the things that irritated you got on my nerves as well. I did like Jill’s character a lot, but I found it irritating the way she seems to be at the center of a tug of war between the men in her life. And when she does get to hang out with other women late in the book, it’s very “not like the other girls.”
There was a serious overuse of the word “slut” in Jill’s internal monologue. It’s clear that the book is trying to resist both the sexism of its setting and the misogyny of a woman being labeled as a slut, but it’s not entirely successful in that regard.
And the magical system was strange. It seemed like we sometimes got way too much information about how it works, and other times, not enough information to understand what was going on.
I don’t know what happens in the next book, but I feel like the story would benefit from killing off Nevyn and Rhodry and letting Jill figure things out on her own.
Well I looked at the synposes for future installments and I can tell you definitively that Nevyn and Rhodry are in it for the long haul, unfortunately.
And YES the magical system was bonkers. I really didn’t understand how that worked at all.
Yeah, I went and looks at some reviews for the later books on Goodreads and it sounds like the author is very committed to the aspects of this one that I didn’t enjoy so much. For example, LOADS of Dramatic Past Lives Where Everything Will Go Wrong Alas. I’m not mad that I took the time to read this book, but I think I’ll skip the fourteen (!) sequels.
Hahaha yeah I will as well. So many sequels that I just don’t care about.
I didn’t really need Nevyn to die, I thought some of the`lessons he learned were okay. But I would not have been upset if Rhodry died, leaving Jill free to pursue dweomer instead of following her man into exile, yet again.
Also, why did she keep falling in love with the Blaen character throughout their lives? Brongwen was in love with Prince Galrion and pretty indifferent about Blaen. Either the characters were destined to repeat their mistakes, in which case Jill should have loved Nevyn despite his age, or they could break free of their destiny and make new mistakes, in which case she didn’t need to be inexplicably drawn to Rhodry. You can’t have it both ways.
I feel like she kept falling in love with Blaen or whatever bc Nevyn wasn’t available? He’d basically taken himself out of the equation. But later in the series they’re reincarnated again together.
I agree on the magic system. For most of it there seemed to be a lot of mystery and things we just had to take on faith, and I was totally okay with that. But then suddenly in the last hundred/two hundred pages there was a ton of really vivid description. Like Kerr was trying to make it all make sense after not really explaining anything. I preferred the vague understanding of dweomer and wyrd over the long descriptions of etheric rivers and auras.
Yeah I would have been happier leaving it a little more mystical? For sure.
I felt pretty tepid about this too. I will admit, though, that while I never really felt super invested, I didn’t have a hard time getting through all 454 pages of it. I guess I really wanted to see what happened next regardless of how I felt about any of the characters.
And I did really love Cullyn by the end. The whole way through I was grumbling because the way it looked like the world and the reincarnation thing was working out was that there was no chance for redemption. Except for Nevyn. Cullyn was always going to be the bad guy to Nevyn. I was really glad to be proven wrong. I loved that he chose to rise above and move past the things that had shamed him lifetime after lifetime.
(As a note though: why was his soul always born in a body related to Brongwen? I mean if Gerraent had been born into someone else and been in love with Jill, would it still have been incest? Seriously, I wondered this over and over. Also, if Cullyn truly wanted to keep Jill from other men why did he keep correcting them when they assumed she was a boy? Let them assume, dude.)
He wasn’t related to her when the other dude was the bard.
But I think it was kind of important for Cullyn to be related to her, in a way, just to mirror the first incarnation, so he can step away and heal his own past.
That’s true, I forgot about the middle incarnation. I guess it was more he wanted what couldn’t be his. And I do like that he eventually made peace with that. In a way Cullyn was the strongest character in the book just for being able to resist his own deeply ingrained sin.
Yeah I agree re: Cullyn
It may just be the fantasy books I’ve happened to read but is it just me or does the fantasy genre have more incest than one would expect? The incest did creep me out, especially the part towards the end that I interpreted as Cullyn was sexually attracted to his daughter the whole time, he just didn’t act on it. Up until that, I thought the reincarnated character had worked past that.
I actually thought that Nevyn was the more interesting character than Jill. Jill was a little too much of the “perfect heroine who is not like other girls” for me. I did have a really hard time keeping up with who was who in the reincarnated timelines and found myself constantly flipping to the back of the book. I understand why Brangwen and Gerraent have to be reborn but I never understood quite why all the minor characters had to come along with them. I kind of assumed that all dweomers were immortal beacuse Aderyn was still alive 300 years later and didn’t think about how that wasn’t really true until I read this review. I didn’t have any trouble finishing Daggerspell, but I can’t believe that this story goes on for 14 more books.
Oh yeah no it wasn’t just you interpreting that, it was straight up incest. I don’t know if there’s more than in any other genre, though I don’t see it in sci fi like . . . ever. It’s in lit fic though.
Nevyn was an interesting character, but not interesting enough to keep me going. I really can’t believe this launched a fifteen book series. That’s just ridiculous.