King Kelson's Bride
A novel by Katherine Kurtz

Pity the King of Gwynedd: No one will leave him alone. Although Kelson Haldane has delivered a hard-won peace to the Eleven Kingdoms; ended the wholesale persecution of the Deryni, a quasi-human race of sorcerers; come to terms with his own Deryni heritage; and overcome assorted threats to himself and his kingdom from within and without, even his closest advisors want more. To wit, they want him to get married and produce an heir of his body, and they want him to do it yesterday.

This is only one small part of King Kelson's Bride, the latest in Katherine Kurtz's long-running Deryni series. With its multiple plotlines designed to tie up all the loose ends from previous books, and its unambiguously happy ending, King Kelson's Bride is clearly Kurtz's gift to her fans, who have been waiting for Kelson to actually get the girl for decades (the first Kelson book appeared in 1970, although only about seven years have elapsed in the Deryniverse). So it truly breaks my heart to have to report that King Kelson's Bride is a tremendous disappointment -- overpopulated, busy, and in all a truly unfortunate climax to her popular Kelson arc.

Oh, it's good to finally see Kelson find some happiness. His first bride, after all, was slain at the altar by her own brother; he then fell in love with the beautiful Rothana, who married his treacherous cousin and bore his son while Kelson was presumed dead in a faraway accident. That hit him hard -- hard enough that as the story opens, he's been moping about it for the past three years. But it's Rothana herself who has hand-picked his new bride: his distant cousin Araxie, Deryni like himself, who will rule Gwynedd with him as a wise and just queen.

Unfortunately, Araxie turns out to be only the first of a number of problems with the book. Title aside, she's something of a nonentity throughout the novel, which is actually more concerned with Kelson's attempts to put the rightful king of former enemy state Torenth on his throne. The cover art pretty much says it all: Kelson stands in an archway, gazing off into the far distance while embracing Araxie, who has her face buried in his shoulder. He's not looking at her, and we can't see her. While we're obviously meant to admire Araxie's statemanship and quiet strength of character, the fact is that she's only in about ten percent of the book, and she pales in comparison to the fiery and determined Rothana. Kurtz simply doesn't take the time to make her a compelling character in her own right.

And how could she, in a book crammed with some one hundred and twenty named characters and far too many subplots? Aside from the Araxie plot and the Torenth plot, there are subplots involving Kelson's mother, his uncle, and several other courtships. That's a lot for a mere 370 pages, and the result is that none of the plots are fully developed, and many fan favorites (e.g., Duncan, Dhugal) end up getting very short shrift.

But even with so much going on, the book is oddly repetitive. Variations of the same two conversations occur over and over and over:

"Kelson, Rothana can never be yours," the supporting character said gently.
Kelson swallowed hard. "I know that now," he whispered. "I suppose I'll just have to accept it. But Jesu, it's hard!"

and

"But can we trust [insert Torenthi's name here]?" Character X asked.
"I don't know," Character Y admitted. "But I think he's a good man. And in any case, I suspect we're about to find out."

Then, too, she focuses on strange things -- uneventful rehearsals for the Torenthi king's coronation, or the alleged bad temper of the mother of one of Kelson's acquaintances (although we see very little of either the acquaintance or her mother.) She does this at the expense of things I, for one, really wanted to revel in. For example, the chapter depicting Kelson's wedding reads very much like Kurtz scrambled it out over the course of a long weekend to the sounds of her editor's frantic voice on the answering machine, calling every hour on the hour to remind her about her impending deadline. And Kelson and Araxie's wedding night, which should have been magical, mystical, and tender, is instead the occasion for a very un-Kurtz-like off-color punchline.

But the biggest disappointment to me was this: Where was the ritual? Where was the magic? The book picks up considerably during the coronation of the Torenthi king, which is full of strange magic, not to mention real suspense. But otherwise, magickal ritual, the backbone of the other Deryni novels, takes a back seat to political intrigue involving secondary characters, to the detriment of the novel overall.

Somewhere, buried in the midst of King Kelson's Bride, is a real corker of a novel (or, more accurately, probably two or three novels). The tension between Kelson's love for Rothana and his duty to Gwynedd, barely explored here, could in and of itself have formed the basis for a much better book. Kurtz herself has done her duty by her fans (and, one assumes, her publisher) by bringing the Kelson arc to a logical and happy conclusion. But I hope, as a longtime devotee of all things Deryni, that her next project is one she does for love.

RE-READ FACTOR: Erm, maybe. I'm more likely to go back to Kurtz's Heirs of Saint Camber series, set a few hundred years before Kelson's time, to get my Deryni fix.

SEQUEL FACTOR: Probably not. It's hard to imagine where Kurtz could take Kelson and company from here.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: Sort of. Rothana is feisty and intelligent, and Araxie is smart and loyal, but there were a few too many hysterical mothers-of-various-brides running around for my taste.

-- Kate Nagy

King Kelson's Bride, published by Ace Books, is currently available in paperback.

We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this review. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com