I recently started rereading Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey. For those who don’t know, it’s an alternate-earth story taking place in (I believe) the 13th or 14th century, where there was another prophet after Jesus who shaped France into something different than what we know today. It’s also known as a kink-heavy novel (and series), where the main character, Phedre, is born with a scarlet mote in her eye that indicates she will someday grow up to be an anguisette. That’s all well and good, and I first read the book about 12 years ago, and I remember enjoying it after chapter three or so.

Much like the first Dragon Tattoo book, upon reread I found the opening chapters substantially more interesting. At first read, Kushiel’s Dart was a fantasy novel with kink elements. But now that I know more about where and when it takes place, I got a lot more out of the part where the monk teaches Phedre and her fellow children about the history of Elua and how he shaped the world.

And then came the chapter when Phedre gets caught sneaking out of the House where she lives. That was an uncomfortable scene to read, not because she got caught, but because of what happened next. I don’t really want to talk about it in detail, because this is a blog for adults and Phedre is not even ten when the scene occurs, but I don’t remember feeling quite so discomfited when I first read the scene, 12 years ago. That might be because I wasn’t interested in reading about Phedre’s upbringing as a young child so I skimmed a lot of the first few chapters, until she joined Delaunay’s household. And honestly, it’s not even what happened; it’s how Phedre felt afterward.

Here’s what makes me conflicted, though: a lot of us spankos have known since well before age 18 that we were into spanking. If we wrote our autobiographies, certainly there would be parts that occurred prior to that age — looking up things in the dictionary, watching or reading certain things over and over again, and even being on the receiving end of corporal punishment. So while it does make sense for the author to write that scene the way she did, I don’t know that she intended it to make readers uncomfortable in quite the way she made me uncomfortable. It’s not like Heinlein, who doesn’t glorify corporal punishment but includes at least references to it in most of his books; that, too, makes me a little uncomfortable (because you shouldn’t hit people who aren’t old enough to consent to it) but he doesn’t go into detail — recently while rereading Friday I found a reference to something like “a moderate amount of spankings” (I’m paraphrasing) being used to modify a child’s behavior, but it’s just a single sentence amid tens of thousands of other words. (In fact, the only time I can remember Heinlein making spanking sexual was in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and in that book it’s between adults.)

That one scene in Kushiel’s Dart is not going to make me put the book down; I’m already seven chapters past where the scene happened. But I feel like that book couldn’t be published today because of the increased sensitivity of readers in general. I imagine that, had she written and submitted Kushiel’s Dart today, Carey would have been told to remove that scene or age up the characters. I know that if I was the editor I certainly would have had some skepticism about publishing it.

So if you’re going to read the book, keep in mind that there’s a rather uncomfortable scene in the fourth chapter, and you may not like it. I won’t not recommend the book in general because I think it’s a good book, but you should go into it warned.