skygiants

Just from the preview in the back of the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy, I had a strong suspicion that I was going to like The Broken Kingdoms much better than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Not that the The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms isn't a good book, but it's a book that relies very strongly on a central romance trope that doesn't do much for me. The Broken Kingdoms, on the other hand, is a.) much less about the romance and b.) about a world that is in the middle of coping with significant cultural change, which I love, and c.) has Oree, who is AWESOME.

But The Broken Kingdoms takes place ten years after The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and also stands on its own, so probably I should review it that way instead of entirely in terms of the first book.

Oree, the narrator of the book, is a thoroughly pragmatic blind artist who makes her living selling tchotchkes to tourists who visit the capital city of Sky. (Which, I have to say, I kind of love as a profession for a fantasy-novel heroine.) She has a complicated relationship with her godling ex-boyfriend, and occasionally she regrets taking in Shiny, the immortal-but-otherwise-powerless homeless guy that she found in her muckbin - he keeps making a mess of the place by trying to kill himself, and it's really annoying - but at least Shiny's useful for housework, and otherwise life is pretty good until she stumbles over a dead godling in the alley across the way.

And then Oree's life gets very rapidly much more complicated, as all of a sudden all the changes that are happening in the world - new godlings coming out of the woodwork all over the place! New gods in charge, some of whom might in fact be thoroughly scary old gods! The monotheistic sect that has ruled the world for millenia finding itself in great confusion! - become very personally relevant to her.

In general, though I'm fairly ambivalent about some of the plot twists towards the end, I found this book much easier to connect with than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I love Oree, and how her blindness is not a source of angst-fodder but just a fact of her life, and that she has friends and a job and a city that she loves before she gets pulled into the whole conspiracy of deities. I feel like I have a much stronger sense of her personality than I ever really did Yeine's. I also love that while Yeine spends the whole book very wary of the gods she's interacting with - and rightly so - Oree's attitude towards them is much more often "wow, you guys are just full of social fail," which I tend to find much more entertaining, and makes the power dynamics feel more balanced even if they aren't actually. It's a much more grounded book, I think (no pun intended, given the setting of the last one) and much less mythological in scope, which is not going to be preferable for everyone but is for me.

Also I think Lil the goddess of hunger is my favorite of the godlings of this universe so far, which may put me in the same category with

vivien529 and her Gentlemen. But she really is kind of adorable! And she never eats people without asking first.

ETA: Warning now for spoilers in comments.