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The Kingdom of Gods - N. K. Jemisin
Jan. 30th, 2019 06:21 pmI read the first two books of the Inheritance Trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, several years ago, but I didn't like book 2 that much and then somehow never got around to getting book 3. Now I finally have, and I really need to get a copy for my bookshelf. (I have a paperback version of the American version for book 3, but I want the UK version to go together with books 1&2.)
So many tropes I love! God&mortal relationships, complicated parent&child and sibling relationships both among gods (and therefore spanning millennia) and humans, betrayals and their aftermath… and many queer characters, and a society/political system on the verge of collapse. (That last bit could really have used some more fleshing out to be really effective, and so could a few of the characters, but what was there was good enough and I really enjoyed what my imagination filled the blanks with.) The ending was fittingly epic.
It's a book written from a god's PoV, but a god who is becoming/has become mortal, which seems to be a surprisingly popular approach – right now I can only recall the Apollo books by Rick Riordan, but I'm sure I've heard of several other stories with that premise. Writing gods is always a challenge: how do you convey that they are not human? Depending on how different from humans and with how many abilities/different perspectives these gods are in a world, that presents different problems.
Sieh is millennia old, to start with; he has known and experienced and done so much but he's still a child, because that's his nature. And godlings have to act according to their nature (childhood in his case, supplemented by games and trickery and mischief), but staying a child through all of that is difficult; a lot of this book is him struggling with that, not always consciously, and he's influenced by his mortal body as well. Though mostly his emotions seem to be quite human – quite cruel at times, even; he's been through a couple of thousand years of trauma but probably even before then, somewhat.
( Spoilers )
Now a reread of books 1 and 2, and then the novella and short stories.
So many tropes I love! God&mortal relationships, complicated parent&child and sibling relationships both among gods (and therefore spanning millennia) and humans, betrayals and their aftermath… and many queer characters, and a society/political system on the verge of collapse. (That last bit could really have used some more fleshing out to be really effective, and so could a few of the characters, but what was there was good enough and I really enjoyed what my imagination filled the blanks with.) The ending was fittingly epic.
It's a book written from a god's PoV, but a god who is becoming/has become mortal, which seems to be a surprisingly popular approach – right now I can only recall the Apollo books by Rick Riordan, but I'm sure I've heard of several other stories with that premise. Writing gods is always a challenge: how do you convey that they are not human? Depending on how different from humans and with how many abilities/different perspectives these gods are in a world, that presents different problems.
Sieh is millennia old, to start with; he has known and experienced and done so much but he's still a child, because that's his nature. And godlings have to act according to their nature (childhood in his case, supplemented by games and trickery and mischief), but staying a child through all of that is difficult; a lot of this book is him struggling with that, not always consciously, and he's influenced by his mortal body as well. Though mostly his emotions seem to be quite human – quite cruel at times, even; he's been through a couple of thousand years of trauma but probably even before then, somewhat.
( Spoilers )
Now a reread of books 1 and 2, and then the novella and short stories.
