Jacqueline Carey’s Naamah’s Kiss lives in the same world as her well known “Kushiel” series, but the focus has shifted from the pain as pleasure in the previous series to the worship of the pleasure of the transitory, the fragile, and the new.  For the first few chapters, we have also left D’Ange and travelled to Alba to meet the Maghuin Dhonn, the people of the Brown Bear, the oldest tribe of Alba and a people whose small magics are only echoes of the great magicians that live in their histories.

We meet Moirin, a child brought up in the empty wilderness by her mother.  Able to slip into the shadows between twilight and the world of the living, Moirin moves undetected and safe through the forest she inhabits, and her life revolves around the small magics she learns from her mother and her secret: the presence of a bright lady and a man with a seedling cupped in his palm, gods from another land.

As Moirin nears puberty, she discovers another gift, an ability to coax seeds to grow, to help plants to thrive, and to gentle give health back to land around her–she also learns that her history, and her heritage, are mixed. Not a pure Maguin Dhonn, her father is a D’Angeline priest, and that heritage may have something to do with her gifts.  The gifts are still small ones, though, and she is quickly distracted by puberty and all of the changes it brings.  Not the least of these changes is the attention of Cillian, the son of the local lord who is rapidly growing infatuated with Moirin. Cillian’s love reveals another of Moirin’s gifts; she has a connection to Naamah, the fallen angel whose domain is sexuality, and Moirin finds desire flowing through her.

Although the connection to the gods of D’Ange runs within her veins, Moirin is still a child of the Maghuin Dhonn, and she cannot stand to become Cillian’s wife and live within stone walls. Her refusal ends with her travelling to a sacred place of the Brown Bear, where she goes through the rite that gives her divine acceptance and reveals that she possesses a hidden destiny that will have her leaving all that she knows to wander the world and search for those she must help, and hopefully some explanation of her mysterious heritage and of those powers that she is still discovering.

Naamah’s Kiss is a very readable fantasy novel. Although Moirin’s attractiveness is explained in some ways by her connection to Naamah, and her pleasure at physical touch justifies many of her choices, Moirin still feels vaguely incomplete as a character.  This lack, though, is balanced with a collection of secondary characters that are fascinating in their own right. Moirin meets princes, priests, queens, and poets and explores three separate lands on her search for the path to her destiny.  Hopefully, her journeys and her companions will continue to help her to grow.

Bookmark to