Bookish Thoughts

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 ...

In the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , NK Jemisin deals with the fallout of that books climax in a rather surprising way. The first book focused on the elite ruling class, the people in power and the way they interacted with the gods. The second book shifts focus to the working poor to examine how they've dealt with all this upheaval. The first book ended with an extreme shift in power. A god who was thought dead was reborn. The captor and imprisoned gods switched places and the newly powerful god is out for vengeance. Balance hasn't been restored to the cosmos, but everyone has started down that path. The second book doesn't do anything to further shift power dynamics (I imagine that will wait for the final book), but it does start everyone down the path to healing. All of this is narrated by a blind woman who can see the effects of magic. This ability helps her navigate the complicated world of the gods and their children, the godlings. She, of ...

NK Jemisin's debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  is different from the majority of fantasy I've read lately. There's no grand adventure or epic battle.At it's heart, this book has more to do with family politics than anything else. Some millenia before this book begins, the three main gods got into a fight that escalated into a war. Ultimately one was killed, one was enslaved in human form, and the third took it upon himself to be the grand ruler of all. The world has been a little off-balance ever since, as exemplified by the cruel and twisted ruling family, the Arameri. But this story focuses on Yeine, newly named heir of the current ruler, Dekarta, despite the fact that her mother was disowned for marrying her father. She finds herself summoned to the capital city, where she must navigate not only her own family politics, but those of the gods who are kept as slaves. The story isn't entirely linear, which I usually love. It mostly works...