The Kingdom of Gods

In the final installment in her Inheritance Trilogy, NK Jemisin greatly increases the scope, focusing not on a single week or month, but encompassing an entire mortal lifetime. The changes that were set in motion in the first book finally reach their inevitable conclusion here, in a pretty stunning and thoughtful book. I found myself torn between wanting to race to the end and wanting to savor every sentence, which is a pretty rare thing. But there are some hard truths in here, about privilege and tradition and the human condition, that Jemisin does a spectacular job of highlighting.

Unlike the previous two books, our narrator this time around is a god. And a trickster god, at that. It makes for a story that tends to jump through time and space rather unexpectedly, because the narrator can't really be bothered with time on a mortal scale. It also means that I spent a great deal of the book waiting for the other shoe to drop, because why would a trickster just tell a story straight? Though I did figure out quite a few things long before they happened, so I was pretty pleased with myself for having the upper hand. Until suddenly I didn't.

This whole trilogy is pretty fantastic. The incorporation of gods in mortal life and all the things that go wrong when they decide to get directly involved, or let their family affairs spill outside their family is really well done. The world Jemisin created, with a plethora of cultures and languages is incredibly engrossing. And I loved the way new perspectives were able to shed additional light on things from earlier in the series, revealing them as far more complicated than anyone is really willing to admit.

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