Book 1 of The Inheritance Trilogy
Rating: 4 out of 5
It’s hard enough for somebody to create a story that’s truly unique and refreshing. It’s even more amazing if an author does it in her first try. N.K. Jemisin’s first offering The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms immediately captures the reader’s attention right at the first page. It is a book of great, fantastic and intriguing ideas. Many of which are fit to be consumed by the modern 21st century audience.
Yeine, the lead character in the story, grew up among barbarians. Her mother, however, came from the Arameri family, the same family that rules only just about the entire world. Yeine’s mother forsook an empire to be with the man she loved and that didn’t sit well with Yeine’s grandfather. In fact, Yeine suspects it even got her mother killed.
Yeine got herself summoned to the capital city, Sky; where she went hoping find the answers to her mother’s death. Instead she found herself declared an heir to the throne. From now on she is a prisoner of fate, and a target for murder… by men and gods alike. Yeine now must find her way through the byzantine maze of politics, find allies in a world where no one can be trusted, and trust her fate, literally, to the gods - the same gods, by the way, who have fallen from grace and are now prisoners of men, used as tools for conquest, subjugation and oppression - the same gods who, if she isn’t careful, are just as happy to see her life ended, for very peculiar reasons.
Jemisin’s characters are powerful. And we’re not really talking about beings capable destroying worlds, but they are characters who leap off the page as if they are flesh and blood, which is strange to say for creatures that are, in reality, improbable. This is very true for one character in particular, the dark god, Nahadoth – wrathful, dangerous, brooding, complex, oh, so very wonderfully complex – he is the very soul of the story. One could imagine the author having fun writing about him.
From the very start, one could see that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not your typical fantasy story. The flavor isn’t your typical type of quasi-medieval or even renaissance European setting, but quite overtly has strong tones of South Asian with a touch of East Asian, African and North American influences. Even the main character isn’t Caucasian, but probably of either North African, Middle Eastern or South Asian features. She is dark, and thank the gods for that, because it is quite refreshing seeing a fantasy world through different eyes, and it isn’t out of place. In fact, N.K. Jemisin shows that it can work. A good storyteller can make it work. Moreover, the author also brings a decidedly feminine touch to the story that isn’t quite off-putting to male readers.
N.K. Jemisin’s story is an amazing blend of fantasy and mythology and even and evolving myth-making where gods are involved and the stakes are not just the entire world, but the whole cosmos, but she manages to make the story low-keyed and not another large grand epic-scaled opus. It is convoluted, but not confusing, and quite easy to follow. Jemisin has weaved a story of contradictions and is another of those works that continues the trend of bucking traditions and taking the genre into new directions. If there’s any weakness, it is that her fantasy world is not defined so much in the book as much as you’d expect in any fantasy work. But Jemesin writes her story in a way that almost states that world-building is sometimes too much overblown in importance anyway that sometimes authors tend to forget other important story features: story and characters. And this is where she put her money on.
The gods must have listened because she’s hit a winner. Those Hugo and Nebula and World Fantasy Awards recognitions say so. And this is just the first book, by the way.
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