Kingdoms and Gods all turned on their heads

#40days40books entry 32

The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin includes The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods and the novella The Awakened Kingdom. The world of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is one rich with magic, trade, lore and upheaval. For two thousand years, the Arameri have ruled using the power of four enslaved gods.

Yeine Darr, a grand-daughter of the ruling Arameri, arrives in Sky after her mother's death. She is a grandchild of the current ruler who has never before met her mother's family. With her comes something entirely new and unexpected. Will she survive her family? Will she survive the gods? Will the gods survive her? The story is riveting, strange, familiar and grand. It ranges over centuries by the end of the novella and is ultimately an incredible portrait of a world built on suffering trying to move towards something more like grace.

If you are N.K. Jemisin - I'm a bit in reader-love with your books and your words, just so you know. This is entirely biased and unapologetic.

I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for a reading group and thought it was really clever and well-developed and a good book. And then I didn't read further in the series because I read another 'clever' book for the same group at about the same time and -

Let's talk about how one book affects another, shall we? Let's talk about how the cynicism that lands when you read books by mediocre authors who use sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, birthplace, etc. as narrative devices rather than descriptors of people who live in a world that doesn't actually have to be genitally connected to the patriarchy and its pathetic excuse for fantasy (derivation only goes so far before you end up with a straight line) can, in fact, limit the range of your response to a well-written book that is doing something entirely different.

That is what happened. I read a derivative book and it affected how I read Jemisin's novel. I labeled it good, but not great, and shied away from its sequels.

When, a few years later I picked up the gorgeousness that is the Trilogy, I was utterly transfixed by the exploration of the world, the discussion of culture, of survivors, and of what is probably the most amazing and complicated and interesting and not-at-all-gross Dark Lover character EVER WRITTEN IN WORDS THAT I CAN READ.

You know how you don't know you're parched until someone gives you water? That's how I felt reading these books.

Hydrate.

It's good for you.

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