Naamah’s Blessing
Hardcover | Kindle
By Jacqueline Carey
Grand Central Publishing
Release date: June 29, 2011

Naamah’s Blessing is Jacqueline Carey‘s grand finale to the Naamah Trilogy, which are the companion books to her Kushiel’s Legacy series. That’s a total of nine books. Having not read any of the first eight books in Carey’s magnum opus, I expected to feel a bit lost, but the author does a good job of connecting all the previous dots through main character and narrator Moirin’s very convenient and near-constant reminiscing of the past.

Once I adjusted to Moirin’s annoying sing-song voice, I tucked in to a tale of great action and adventure in which we follow Moirin and her husband, Bao, as they journey across vast seas to Terre d’Ange, home of Moirin’s father and half of her ancestry. Moirin is following her Destiny, as guided by her diadh-anam, which is the “spark of the soul of the Maguin Dhonn,” or the Great Bear, which is the other half of Moirin’s ancestry inherited from her mother, who lives in Moirin’s place of birth called Alba.

Moirin’s diadh-anam is meant to guide her throughout her life and, apparently, is also an overused plot device Carey uses to offer lazy reasons why Moirin does everything that she does. Moirin also shares her diadh-anam with her husband, as she’d given it to him to bring him back from the dead in a previous book, as Moirin explains over and over again. Should Moirin break any sworn oath she’s made to anyone, the Great Bear would snuff out her diadh-anam, leaving her clueless as to how to live her life, and Bao would die for good, which might have made for a more interesting tale.

This diadh-anam also enables Moirin to summon the magic of the Maguin Dhonn so she can evoke the “twilight,” another super-handy plot device that renders her invisible to other characters so she can gain information that a first-person narrative wouldn’t normally have access to. It also makes it possible for her to grow things out of season, which comes in handy later in the story when an entire country of people is on the verge of starvation after a “black river of ants” is released from the power of the mad king who rules them and they literally eat everything.

Though Moirin’s welcome back to Terre d’Ange is rather controversial due to events that transpired in earlier books, she is greeted warmly by the sad King Daniel, her cousin and husband of the dead Queen Jehanne who, we learn, was Moirin’s lover in a previous book where she died while giving birth to the young highness, Princess Desiree, whom Moirin swears an oath to protect. Also vexing King Daniel is the fact that his only son, Prince Thierry, has been gone too long on a trade quest in the very, very faraway Terra Nova. When word is received that the young prince has perished, King Daniel hurls himself into the sea, leaving 4-year-old Desiree an orphan and susceptible to the influence of the overly ambitious Duc de Barthelme and his even more ambitious wife, Claudine, and their repugnant 14-year-old son, Tristan, to whom the little girl is prematurely betrothed.

Following her diadh-anam, Moirin sets about on a quest to find Prince Thierry in order to honor her sworn oath to protect Desiree’s happiness. Of course, she has other challenges to her diadh-anam as she’s already sworn a conflicting oath to the mad ant king and former love of her life, the brilliant but possessed Raphael de Mereliot.

Naamah’s Blessing — the blessing, not the book — as it turns out, is yet another plot device to make the characters horny when necessary, either for political reasons or for the pure joy of sex. As Naamah is the ruling goddess of Terre d’Ange, it is a land of perfectly acceptable polyamorous and often bisexual relations; even married couples follow their loins to other beds in the name of Naamah and it’s okay, because Naamah says so.

For an epic tale that spans several years and crosses many continents it is to my great chagrin that I can only say it was an okay read. The gentle climb towards the climax, which was more of an ant hill than a great apex, sloped back down with as much gentleness it nearly drove me mad. None of the main characters seems to be in all that much jeopardy and those who are pass rather peacefully out of the story. Where’s the real strife? Where’s the passion? Why is Moirin so damned right all the time? Someone, anyone, make a big damned mistake so that I can feel for something you!

In the whole 610 pages, I never connected on any emotional level with the characters, the time, or the place. The dialogue sounded as if it came from one character throughout and all the characters, I felt, were rather shallow. I closed the backcover utterly unchanged and underwhelmed. This grand finale wasn’t such a grand affair at all. Perhaps after writing eight previous books containing more or less the same characters, or descendants thereof, Carey simply ran out of steam. The story stands on its own, thanks to all the backstory included in the narration and I don’t feel compelled to go back and read any of the previous books. I couldn’t care less if Moirin lost her diadh-anam, if Bao dropped dead, or if they all were swallowed up by the Great Bear in the end.

The many fans of Carey’s Kusheil’s Legacy series may feel let down by Naamah’s Blessing, but the door is left open at the end for several characters. Perhaps we’ll see a whole new series once Carey’s had a much needed break from these characters.