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N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not a book that I fell madly in love with, but it is a book that I liked a great deal and thought was very well-done, and that I think a lot of you guys would like too. Here are some reasons why:
1. Mythology! The center of the book is a creation myth that feels real and complicated, and the gods involved in that creation myth are real and complicated and pretty clearly nonhuman figures. Some bonus pluses: the creation myth uses a lot of nonstandard imagery and involves an Epic World-Balancing OT3 (that is now unbalanced, because gods are crazy.) Also there is a lot of really interesting exploration of power dynamics within the context of enslaved/bound superpowerful beings.
2. Culture-building! The world of the book sets up one culture that has managed to exert dominance over a whole lot of others, and the other cultures are legitimately different and complicated and not written just to engage our sympathies by being The Underdogs - I mean, they do engage our sympathies, but all of the cultures involved contain customs that seem reasonable and customs that seem crazy, as different cultures do, and there are conflicts that grow organically out of those differences. I love it when authors pull that off. Our Protagonist has a foot in two different cultures; she's grown up in one, and gets summoned to the other, and while the one she grew up in has a much clearer hold on her affections (and she thinks everyone in the other one is a vicious lunatic), there is also a lot of complexity in her relationship to both, and that is very cool too.
3. Complicated politics! I mentioned that Our Protagonist gets ordered to leave her small "barbarian" country and is summoned to the center of the empire; I should also say that she is summarily thrown into the middle of an amoral political mess that is probably going to end in her almost-inevitable death. If you like stories about straightforward heroines thrown into dangerous political atmospheres where they have to make choices of dubious morality, this one is really well done, and there were several twists I didn't see coming.
Uh, basically, if you could not pick up the plot from the things I just listed, here is a summary: Our Protagonist Yeine, the daughter of the head of a minor northern kingdom and the disinherited heir to the enormous empire, gets summoned to aforementioned enormous empire and told that she is now one of the options to be Queen Of Everything. Awesome! Except not, because - aside from the fact tht Yeine has no interest in fighting the other heirs for the title of Queen of Everything - everyone (including her grandfather, who's the one who named her an heir) totally expects her to die, and while the bound gods running around hate everyone else involved and may sort of be on her side, they have complicated plans for her too that are probably not going to turn out too well for her in the long run.
The reason that I did not fall madly in love with the book is mostly just that I was not that invested or interested in the central relationship; as far as well-done crazy dangerous tormented superpowerful boy(/girl)friends go Nahadoth is very well done, technically speaking, and I though the power dynamics between Nahadoth and Yeine were interestingly explored and avoided a lot of problematic tropes, but I still spent most of the time agreeing with the rest of the text that Yeine/Nahadoth was probably a bad idea for all concerned (this despite the fact that it had a very cool and unusual way to work out, in the end. Not to mention changing the entire dynamic of the universe, um.) I found all of Kinneth's backstory relationships much more interesting - with her father, with her husband, with her daughter - and I kind of wish we had gotten to know more about them. I found Yeine's relationship with Sieh interesting too (and Sieh himself was awesome), but I kept wanting her to have more relationships that were human. But human relationships are patently not what the book itself was interested in, and that's totally fair. Anyway, I suspect the next book is going to grab me more, just from the snippet in the back of this one; if the protagonist continues to be as amazingly eyerolly at the manpainy sungod as she was in the few pages there were, I expect to be enormously entertained!
1. Mythology! The center of the book is a creation myth that feels real and complicated, and the gods involved in that creation myth are real and complicated and pretty clearly nonhuman figures. Some bonus pluses: the creation myth uses a lot of nonstandard imagery and involves an Epic World-Balancing OT3 (that is now unbalanced, because gods are crazy.) Also there is a lot of really interesting exploration of power dynamics within the context of enslaved/bound superpowerful beings.
2. Culture-building! The world of the book sets up one culture that has managed to exert dominance over a whole lot of others, and the other cultures are legitimately different and complicated and not written just to engage our sympathies by being The Underdogs - I mean, they do engage our sympathies, but all of the cultures involved contain customs that seem reasonable and customs that seem crazy, as different cultures do, and there are conflicts that grow organically out of those differences. I love it when authors pull that off. Our Protagonist has a foot in two different cultures; she's grown up in one, and gets summoned to the other, and while the one she grew up in has a much clearer hold on her affections (and she thinks everyone in the other one is a vicious lunatic), there is also a lot of complexity in her relationship to both, and that is very cool too.
3. Complicated politics! I mentioned that Our Protagonist gets ordered to leave her small "barbarian" country and is summoned to the center of the empire; I should also say that she is summarily thrown into the middle of an amoral political mess that is probably going to end in her almost-inevitable death. If you like stories about straightforward heroines thrown into dangerous political atmospheres where they have to make choices of dubious morality, this one is really well done, and there were several twists I didn't see coming.
Uh, basically, if you could not pick up the plot from the things I just listed, here is a summary: Our Protagonist Yeine, the daughter of the head of a minor northern kingdom and the disinherited heir to the enormous empire, gets summoned to aforementioned enormous empire and told that she is now one of the options to be Queen Of Everything. Awesome! Except not, because - aside from the fact tht Yeine has no interest in fighting the other heirs for the title of Queen of Everything - everyone (including her grandfather, who's the one who named her an heir) totally expects her to die, and while the bound gods running around hate everyone else involved and may sort of be on her side, they have complicated plans for her too that are probably not going to turn out too well for her in the long run.
The reason that I did not fall madly in love with the book is mostly just that I was not that invested or interested in the central relationship; as far as well-done crazy dangerous tormented superpowerful boy(/girl)friends go Nahadoth is very well done, technically speaking, and I though the power dynamics between Nahadoth and Yeine were interestingly explored and avoided a lot of problematic tropes, but I still spent most of the time agreeing with the rest of the text that Yeine/Nahadoth was probably a bad idea for all concerned (this despite the fact that it had a very cool and unusual way to work out, in the end. Not to mention changing the entire dynamic of the universe, um.) I found all of Kinneth's backstory relationships much more interesting - with her father, with her husband, with her daughter - and I kind of wish we had gotten to know more about them. I found Yeine's relationship with Sieh interesting too (and Sieh himself was awesome), but I kept wanting her to have more relationships that were human. But human relationships are patently not what the book itself was interested in, and that's totally fair. Anyway, I suspect the next book is going to grab me more, just from the snippet in the back of this one; if the protagonist continues to be as amazingly eyerolly at the manpainy sungod as she was in the few pages there were, I expect to be enormously entertained!