A solid freshman effort

My introduction to the works of N. K. Jemisin was through her Hugo-Award-winning series The Broken Earth. It’s a series I have been pushing on friends and family since I read it last year because it is a whole nother level of OH MY GOD spectacular and deserves every ounce of praise it receives. Go read it now.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms with what one might call high expectations and was understandably somewhat disappointed. The Broken Earth sets the bar just impassably high and by reading things in this order, I’m backtracking. N. K. Jemisin is clearly gifted and only getting better with experience, so it is interesting to see where she started. So maybe this book isn’t great, but it is worth reading.

Oversimplified: Yeine is the barbarian daughter of an exiled princess. When her mother unexpectedly dies, her grandfather calls her back into the fold, to live in their floating palace and compete with two cousins she has never met to be heir to a kingdom she barely knows. Along the way, she meets a lot of gods. Intrigue, chaos, death, and war follow.

I really like the worlds that Jemisin creates. Her books are overflowing with histories and mythologies of worlds that have never existed and somehow aren’t copied one to the next. You can pick up any of her series and it will be wholly unique–so much more than a rehash of something she’s written previously. Like I said, she is incredibly talented.

I also like her disjointed storytelling. You see more of it here than in The Killing Moon, about as much as you get in The Broken Earth. I think it’s a neat way to tell a story, executed properly. But the prose isn’t as good and the characters just aren’t as compelling as the ones she will create in her later novels. I am still glad I read it.