The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms [Paperback]

[This review is based on an Advanced Reading Copy]

What if gods were real...and walked among us...enslaved...and were used as weapons...and were really pissed off about it?

N.K. Jemisin is a gifted storyteller and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a satisfying tale built on intriguing ideas. Buy this book if you love the flights of imagination only possible in fantasy. Buy it if you love stories of betrayal, murder, hard truths, and being in way over your head.

The book is written in the first person. I usually hate this. Here, it works. There are scattered, apparent digressions: snippets of history, backstory. This may bother you. I thought it fit, and the digressions served a purpose. Though the story deals with politics at the highest level, the cast is small. For those who get lost and frustrated in a George R. R. Martin-sized cast, this is a boon. Jemisin's characters are clearly differentiated and easy to remember. Those who love additional complexity may wish the cast were larger and the book longer. This IS the first book in a trilogy, so I'm sure we'll get to see more in later books. The world is fascinating, but we spend most of this book inside the central palace of Sky. The visuals are clear and cool.

[Full disclosure: I have met Ms. Jemisin once, and she is published by the same company I am. However, neither she nor Orbit asked me to do this review.]

N.K. Jemisin is a debut novelist who deserves the chance to write many more novels. But you don't care about that, and you shouldn't. The only question that matters to you is, "Among all my other options, is THIS book worth my money and my time?" Yes, and yes. Emphatically.

-Brent Weeks
NYT Best-selling Author of The Night Angel Trilogy

There's a lot of hype about this book, coming even from people whose opinions I respect, so when I found a cheap copy I snatched it up. The back cover copy suggests political intrigue, fascinating worldbuilding, a good romance. The book offers none of these things.

The worldbuilding is, in brief places, quite interesting. I drank up little details about Yeine's culture, matrilineal and female-dominant, yet more complex than the "man-eating bitches" variant I've seen elsewhere. Do we get a full exploration of this society? Sadly not. Is Yeine a complicated product of it, struggling with her mixed heritage and, now, the transition from leader of her tribe to the token barbarian girl in a patrilineal white society? No. As with the other hints - distant lands, the division between Naha and Nahadoth - we are given too little, in favour of Sky and the relationships within it. I suspect we are meant to find Sky boring - it's entirely white and smooth and sterile - but intention hardly distracts from how terribly, terribly boring it is to read about Sky. Surely it could have merited a few pretty lines of description, but Jemisin's prose is bare and simple. Description seems low on the book's priorities. (One glimmer is the old temple with two boarded-up windows - a great detail - but soon we're back to white, plain Sky. The good bits are only glimmers.)

If Sky is intentionally bland, the characterisation and plot should compensate, yes? Sadly not. The plot focuses on relationships more than political scheming; when it switches to the latter, it's a politics without the layers and difficult-to-penetrate intentions of a book that pitches itself as being about politics. In some places, the politics seems a distraction before we get back to the important business of Yeine talking to gods and fretting a bit. I did like the chapter called "Diamonds" (all the chapters are named as straightforwardly and pointlessly as this, as if numbers alone are too naked); I can believe in Yeine's need to take a blunt approach in her limited time scale, and the method is fun to read. Little else impressed me.

A relationship-focused story requires great characters to succeed. This story offers little. I adored Sieh, a layered and pleasant-to-read character, and found Nahadoth sometimes interesting - especially the underexplored Naha/Nahadoth aspect of him. Sometimes he reminded me too much of the melodramatic hero in manga or fanfiction. - SPOILERS - In fact, a lot of the relationship between Yeine and Nahadoth reminded me of fanfiction, which is not a slight on the entire genre; rather, I thought of the overwrought and silly relationships depicted in some stories, with kisses at unexpected moments, proclamations of lost tenderness, assurances that it is not lost, no, merely hidden in the terrible present, and a truly ridiculous sex scene. (They fly through the universe and see whales with the faces of long-lost friends.)
- END SPOILERS -

Yeine herself had so much potential. The young leader of her tribe, uprooted to a distant and deeply different seat of power, where she is quickly expected to know enough to survive. And there are glimpses of her background affecting the present: the world's equivalent of coloured contact lenses freaks her out, she's blunter than her Arameri relations, she makes an effort to research various things. Yet never did I believe in her ability to lead a tribe, to act with more than her bluntness, to plan in the long-term, to participate in any kind of culture - because she, like Sky, is so bland. Certainly she lacks agency for much of the novel, through no fault of her own, but in her frustration and confusion and attempts to act I got no good glimpse of the woman she is said to be. She finds the cold-hearted culture incomprehensible, but little else of the Arameri surprises her; perhaps her Arameri mother prepared her for its differences, but fundamental things like the role of men and women never seem to trouble her. Never even draw a remark. There's one moment when she's condescending towards men. One, that I recall, in 398 pages narrated by a woman from a female-dominated society. Even if her mother schooled her into a more equal-handed attitude - though I wonder what her tribe would have thought - it didn't ring true.

Other characters, besides Sieh, impressed me just as little. I'd have liked more of Relad, her male cousin, but he's sidelined in favour of evil Scimina. The author admits to intentionally writing Scimina as two-dimensional "Just Because" a fantasy story needs a big Evil and if Scimina had been otherwise, Yeine might have sympathised with her and found it difficult to act against her. (I am not lying: [...]) This refusal to give Yeine a moral quandary is indicative of how little Yeine pays for the entire core plot. Her god-friends are tortured but heal immediately, and at least externally brush off the psychological wounds. She is taken from her homeland but, as with much else of Yeine's character, I didn't actually feel convinced by her moments of homesickness. By the end, she has gained a lot, yet she's not especially struggled. If she'd sat on her hands for two weeks, the ending in Sky would essentially have been the same (though the side-plot of her homeland's military situation would probably have turned out worse for them). Dekarta, T'vril and Viraine never excited me, nor did the other trapped gods - none of whom, besides Sieh, read believably like gods.

Everything about this book had such potential. By the end, I thought forlornly of it written differently, with a denser plot and complicated characters, and wish I'd read that book instead. This one just disappoints with its all-round blandness.

Hype. A powerful tool in the publishing industry. It's an impressive achievement when a yet-to-be-published author can create and maintain buzz about their debut novel, with readers going gaga over something that hasn't even hit store shelves. It's exciting for those readers, but dangerous as well. For every time an author lives up to that hype (Patrick Rothfuss) several others fail to take advantage, to prove they were worth it (Robert Newcomb, anyone?). As a reviewer, I try to separate myself from the hype, to choose my books based on what I find interesting, not what the publishers are pushing hardest. Sometimes, though, it's unavoidable. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin is one of those cases.

As with any highly-anticipated novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms had predefined itself in my mind, based on nothing more than the blurb on the back of the book and the beautiful cover. Before it even arrived on my doorstep, it was a victim of preconceptions and expectations. I opened The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms expecting one book and found a very different beast within. Expectations are often dangerous, but in this case, the smashing of them was a very good thing indeed, for I expected a familiar story, only to find a wonderfully original one in its place.

The synopsis hints at a traditional novel - young, naive protagonist, whisked into adventure and intrigue, shouldered with the responsibility of saving the world and navigating the bloody politics of her land. Even the tittle, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms suggests the novel is an expansive struggle of lands and kingdoms, typical of Epic Fantasy (or Secondary World Fantasy, take your pick of sub-genre). For a truer impression of the novel, one has to consider its history, or, more aptly, the history of its title.

Originally, the novel was titled The Sky-God's Lover, a title much more accurate to the tone and plot of the novel. Jemisin's novel is very much a character-driven narrative, delving deep into the politics and relationships between its small cast of characters, rather than the kingdom-encompassing politics that its published title may suggest. Now, there is some true politicking included, but only a handful of the `Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' are involved, and the disputes are more a display of power and coercion in the bitter relationship between protagonist Yeine and antagonist Scimina. For a novel titled The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms there is little world building or world-ranging conflict. The true heart of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms lies in Yeine's relationship to the characters (human and god) around her, most importantly the fallen Sky God, Nahadoth. The Sky-God's Lover hints at the complexity of this relationship as it winds through its labyrinthine twists and turns through the slim novel.

Many novels written in first person perspective are done so for stylistic reasons only. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms embraces the that style and weaves a story that could only be told directly from Yeine's mouth (or pen, I suppose). There is a subtle dichotomy between and Yeine-the-girl, whom the story is about, and Yeine-the-woman, who narrates the story. Jemisin often breaks the fourth wall, with Yeine-the-narrator gathering her thoughts, throwing doubt on her recollections of events or characters and leaving the constant feeling that much is left unsaid, that the truths of the story are between the words, just out of reach.

Those characters surrounding Yeine are a mixed bag. The gods Nahadoth and Sieh are tragic and compelling, the relationship between them and Yeine growing organically through the novel. In contrast, Scimina, who stands in as the antagonist for the novel (for lack of a better term) is shallow and cliched - mean for the meanness sake, never as intelligent as the reader is told she is, and lacking in depth or motivation beyond desiring to rule the kingdoms. Her brother Relad, the other contender to the throne alongside Scimina and Yeine, is even shallower - a drunkard who sees very little screen time and serves more as a plot device than a character. Jemisin chose to focus on the gods, who are admittedly more interesting than the humans, and so the politicking for the throne is less compelling than it could have been.

Magic is central to the story - from the subtle magic used to reconstruct a trashed bedroom, to the earth shattering magic of a mad god - but there is little in the way of rules to contain the magic, beyond deciding which higher-ranking noble outranks the other and can control the whims of the chained gods. It does anything needed, no questions asked. But, then, these are gods we're talking about, so perhaps that's fitting. Certainly the spectacle is there and Jemisin's imagery of the magic is astute and often astounding.

Jemisin's novel is tonally reminiscent of Daniel Abraham's The Long Price Quartet, a quiet reflection on the important themes of love, prejudice, rule and family. Yeine explores and fights with these facets of relationship and shows remarkable growth through the story. The relationships can often be brash and heavy-handed, but, like any that develop quickly and in times of duress, they are realistically bold and whimsical. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is marketed as the first volume of a trilogy but stands entirely on its own, with all major plot strings tied up at the end, the premise of future volumes hinted at only in the final pages of the satisfying climax.

Oftentimes, hype can be a dangerous thing, but in the case of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I fell for the trap - hook, line and sinker. In the end, the few shortcomings of the novel were easily overlooked as Jemisin took my expectations and tossed them away, giving me a novel I never knew I wanted, but ended up needing so badly. A confident debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms promises of great things to come from this bright new voice in Fantasy fiction.

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