The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Inheritance trilogy, Book 1
N. K. Jemisin
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Yeine Darr never expected to set foot in the wondrous capital city of Sky at the heart of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, despite her mother having been a daughter of the current Arameri monarch Dekarta. The price of marrying her father, a man of the jungle woodlands of distant Darr, was to forsake her royal heritage. Only now, after her mother was poisoned (no doubt by agents of Dekarta), a summons has come from Sky, one that Yeine dare not refuse. After all, the Arameri lineage traces their near-absolute power to an ancestor who, many centuries ago, bound the very gods themselves to servitude; to defy a summons would be to risk not only her own life but her nation and everyone she loves.
To the shock of everyone, especially herself, the ailing lord Dekarta declares her an heiress, putting her in contention for his soon-to-be-vacant crown alongside two cousins she's never met and plunging her into the monstrous world of Arameri courtiers with no idea whom she can trust or how to survive. Unexpectedly, the captive gods of Sky reach out to Yeine, offering an alliance and a chance to avenge her mother's murder. But does Yeine dare trust them?
REVIEW: I've enjoyed what I've read of Jemisin's works so far, and the premise of this fantasy trilogy sounded intriguing, promising a richly multicultural world where humans enslave the very entities that created them. Perhaps it was my own high expectations that undercut me, because, while I enjoyed The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms well enough, I kept expecting something a little more out of it than it ultimately delivered.
While the premise is familiar enough from other fantasy tales, the setting Jemisin presents has some nice trappings and twists. The main gimmick, such as it is, is the enslaved deities and the human scriveners who have learned to harness the power of the divine written language to work near-miraculous magicks. Power tending to corrupt, the sprawling Arameri clan has by now been quite nearly corrupted absolutely; the city of Sky, literally stretching upward towards the heavens and casting the surrounding city into shadow, fairly seethes with hedonism, cruelty, and backstabbing as a way of life. Since none without Arameri blood are safe in Sky after nightfall (for reasons related to the captive deities), even the lowest of servants are relatives of the highest power brokers in the realm, so even family ties are not enough to spare a body from ill treatment. Simply getting on a rival noble's bad side is enough to condemn distant lands and hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians to enslavement or death in conflicts that mean little more than the shifting of game tokens on a board to the people of Sky. Everyone has an agenda, even the gods in their chains, though Yeine is no different in her way when she arrives; though she knew she couldn't resist a royal summons if she tried, she is determined to see whoever ordered the death of her mother pay in kind before she herself is killed (as seems inevitable) in the scramble for a throne she does not even want. But even she, an outsider to Sky, knows better than to blindly accept the word of a god at face value. She makes some missteps and mistakes as she struggles to sort friend from foe (or rather, casual foe from actively-trying-to-kill-her foe, as actual friends are not really a thing in the toxic atmosphere of Sky). She also tries to understand her late mother and why the woman ran away to live in the wilds of Darr, finding a truth far more complicated than she was prepared to face... not unlike the real reason she was brought all the way back to the capital after a lifetime in the hinterlands and obscurity, a reason that puts a hard deadline on her own agenda (and lifespan).
As Yeine struggles to stay afloat in the perpetual storm of Sky life, she also finds herself pulled into the lives and complex relationships of the gods, most particularly the dangerously mercurial (and alluring) Nahadoth, god of night and chaos, and Sieh, trickster deity with a childish aspect. Nahadoth is most often bound (literally, leashed) by Scimina, sadistic heiress and rival to replace Dekarta, but from the start Yeine finds herself drawn to him despite the dangers; even the gods cannot always control their powers among mortals. Sieh brings out a maternal, protective side in Yeine... part of a trend that started subtle but grew more prominent and irritating as the tale wound on. For all her determination to be her own master and pursue vengeance above all else, and despite being raised in a matrilinear nation where women command and fight while men are protectors of hearth and home, Yeine too often ends up being the motherly nurturer charged with soothing tears and healing broken people, particularly males, and things that said broken people destroyed. To really get into this would be to court spoilers, but it nearly dropped the story another half-star in the ratings by the end. There was also some confusion and "name soup" in the many servants, rivals, gods, relatives, and other terms I was meant to keep straight, not all of which ended up pulling enough weight by the end. The forbidden passion between Nahadoth and Yeine also had some dark undercurrents (likely intentional, but leaned into a little hard for my tastes). The ending was ultimately reasonably satisfying, but I can't say I'm that invested in the world to continue with the rest of the series, possibly in part because the people of Sky were too unpleasant for me to want to linger in their realm.
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