The Black Jewels Trilogy: Joy and pain, rage and celebration

THE BLACK JEWELS TRILOGY by Anne Bishop

Imagine a fairy-tale heroine. You know the type: beautiful, kind, able to charm all the beasties of the forest into eating out of her hand. On the astral plane, she even has a unicorn’s horn. Now imagine that she has enough magical power to move mountains. (Literally.)

You might think this is a recipe for the worst Mary Sue in the history of literature, but in Black Jewels, it works. There’s a reason Jaenelle is the way she is. One of her titles is “dreams made flesh,” which means that Jaenelle is the embodiment of the desperate hopes of all the downtrodden people and animals in the realms of Terreille, Kaeleer, and Hell. She is impossibly powerful because she needs to be, and because she was created to be. It also works because Jaenelle is not the point-of-view character. The story is told through the eyes of the three men who, each in his own way, love her.

As the story begins, Terreille is ruled by cruel and brutal Queens. The social structure was originally meant to work according to chivalric principles: Queens would rule, and men would serve and protect them for love’s sake. But over centuries, power has corrupted the Queens. The most powerful men are kept as slaves and controlled by means of sexual torture. Young witches with the potential to become powerful are often raped at a Queen’s command, so as to break them of their power and eliminate them as threats. Jaenelle’s destiny is to cleanse the realms of this corruption.

I should probably warn readers about the heaps of sexual violence in Black Jewels. Rape, child molestation, castration, you name it, it’s here.

If the whole series were like that, I probably would have stopped reading partway through the first book. What kept me going was the tenderness that developed among the principal characters, even in the midst of horror. That, and the humor. (I loved it when Jaenelle accidentally moved an entire fortress while trying to use magic to summon her shoes!) These bright spots give the reader an idea of what the characters are fighting for, and what a Queen’s court should be. Black Jewels would not have been half as effective if it had just been one gory scene after another. I keep thinking of Janine Cross‘s Touched by Venom, which was often compared to Black Jewels, but which didn’t have any brightness to balance the nastiness.

It can be difficult, at first, to navigate the complex universe Anne Bishop has created. I spent the first few chapters scratching my head over Queens and witches and Warlords and Warlord Princes and Gates and Webs and so on. I also had trouble getting a grip on what time period the setting of Black Jewels might be analogous to. There were times it felt like a medieval setting, and times it seemed almost modern. After a while, though, I was able to figure out most of it and to chalk the rest up to “it’s magic, it works somehow” and sink into the story.

Black Jewels follows Jaenelle’s friends as they attempt to keep her safe and sane until she can claim her full power. The story builds to a dramatic, moving climax that isn’t the stereotypical Big Fantasy Battle. The plot sags a bit in places, especially in Heir to the Shadows. However, I enjoyed Black Jewels enough that I’ve reread it a couple of times.