The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy #1)

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Average customer rating 5 (5 comments)

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This book made me an instant Jemisin fan - I seriously love this book. Powerful story, fascinating characters you love (or hate, or can't figure out how to feel about - just like people!), an intriguing world and ideas that make you thing. It was nominated for all the major fantasy fiction awards, and deserved it. The rest of the trilogy is just as great.

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I don't read a lot of fantasy (I'm more of a science fiction guy), but picked up this book because it was one of the 2011 Hugo nominees for best novel--and I loved it. The second book is also excellent, albeit very different; and the third is already on my bookshelf, waiting for me. Highly recommended.

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Incredibly powerful and beautifully written - highly and enthusiastically recommended. I'm generally someone who chooses robust character development over well-crafted language, but Jemisin uses her elegant style in service of the plot, making the choice unneccessary. Her world is fully formed without being overly detailed, and the plot is complex and engaging, but never intricate for its own sake. Yeine, the protagonist, balances being fiercely independent with growing into herself. In general, most of the characters have a level of detail and nuance that make the book unusually deep and satisfying, and it's one I would recommend to anyone who likes speculative fiction (as well as a fair number of folks who just don't like it *yet*).

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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a new debut author release from NK Jemisin. The world building portrayed throughout this book is fantastical and the characters and how they relate to each other was such a breath of new life to the genre that I was totally absorbed in the book for an evening. This book is fantastical with a brand new host of characters that do not involves ghosts, angels, or vampires. We have a hierarchy if humans and their class issues and then we have a host of gods and godlings. There is just enough back story to love and not to much that you want to skip lengthy descriptions of the world. You get a taste of the different lives but are totally drawn into the main characters. If you want an epic fantasy/scifi read full of new life, pick to up. You will not be disappointed.

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I read an advance copy of this novel. For me, the prose was the major selling point; that along with the angst and audacity of holding gods captive. Jemisin's prose is, put simply, gorgeous. It has a rhythm that effortlessly drew me into the fantasy world she created. Never once did I doubt Yeine's voice, and every sentence made me crave more of it. Yeine is young - not yet twenty - but before the novel begins, she's chief of her people in the matriarchal country of Darr. She's also grieving for her mother, whose recent unexpected death was suspicious. Now she's a stranger in a strange land, given privileges she didn't expect, doesn't want, and distrusts. There's a lot in this novel about privilege: privilege granted by the gods' favor, privilege of wealth and attendant political power, privilege of social rank. The human privilege on display interacts with the implications of captive gods in ways I found fascinating. So far as the plot went, Yeine's cousin and grandfathers were in opposition to her, but to me they weren't the point at all; the point was Yeine's developing relationships with two of the captive gods, Sieh and Nahadoth, and even more importantly, Yeine's coming to terms with her mother and the choices her mother made. Those relationships were incredibly deep; the gods in this novel have the same depth and complexity as gods taken from "real world" mythology - Sieh is a child god, but also a trickster, and an adolescent torn by grief and doubt, and an old god borne down by grief; Nahadoth is darkness and glory and fear and danger, but also poignant grief. Yeine's mother was just as complex and contradictory, both a loving mother and a ruthless politician, and in some ways more privileged than the captive gods, because she had power over them. All in all, a wonderful book, and one that I think will reward rereading.