Bibliotrek

Orbit, 2010. Click to embiggen.

I’m not gonna lie: I picked up this book because of the cover.

I was wan­der­ing through the library and it was fac­ing out on a shelf of new fic­tion. The col­ors caught my eye, and then I looked more closely at it and thought, “AWESOME, a woman of color is the hero­ine!” And, after fin­ish­ing the book, I am even more impressed by this cover; it seems like the artist not only read but really under­stood what the book is all about and man­aged to turn that into visual form. Seri­ously, I think this is one of my favorite book cov­ers ever.

But on to the book itself!

I tweeted a cou­ple of days ago about how much I was enjoy­ing The Hun­dred Thou­sand King­doms. As soon as I fin­ished the book, I wanted the forth­com­ing sequel — not because the story is incom­plete (indeed, this may be the first book of a tril­ogy, but it could eas­ily stand alone) but because the world and char­ac­ters were so compelling.

So here’s the back cover copy:

Yeine Darr is an out­cast from the bar­bar­ian north. But when her mother dies under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances, she is sum­moned to the majes­tic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hun­dred Thou­sand King­doms is not eas­ily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle.

I don’t know if that would have been enough to con­vince me to take the book home. What did that was read­ing the first few pages. The book opens, “I am not as I once was,” and the next thing I knew I had fin­ished the first chap­ter, while I was just stand­ing there by the book­shelf. So of course I checked it out.

Yeine is an amaz­ing nar­ra­tor. She is strong and resilient and clever, and — as indi­cated by the rela­tion­ships she devel­ops — there’s also a cer­tain dark­ness to her char­ac­ter. She can be ruth­less, but she is never mer­ci­less. She nav­i­gates the treach­er­ous social land­scape of Sky with a cer­tain amount of aplomb, in spite of her sta­tus as “bar­bar­ian” out­sider. In fact, one of the most char­ac­ter­is­tic aspects of Sky — and one of the most tren­chant social crit­i­cisms of the book — is how bar­baric that sup­pos­edly “civ­i­lized” soci­ety is: vio­lent, blood­thirsty, hyp­o­crit­i­cal, arro­gant, and based on slav­ery. Life in Darr is also some­times vio­lent, espe­cially for Yeine, but its vio­lence, how­ever appalling to me, still serves a larger social pur­pose for the Darre beyond mere entertainment.

The other char­ac­ters that I found most com­pelling were Yeine’s stew­ard, T’vril, and the trick­ster god, Sieh. I liked Lord Nahadoth the best when he too played the trick­ster, even though his trick­ery was always more explic­itly dan­ger­ous than Sieh’s. At one point Yeine explic­itly dis­cusses Nahadoth’s spe­cific appeal and her attrac­tion to him: she calls it esui, the long­ing for the bad boy, for dan­ger, for all those appeal­ing things that are so unsafe. I think Nahadoth will appeal to those who also expe­ri­ence esui: fans of the orig­i­nal Drac­ula, for instance.

One fea­ture of the book that I should note is the digres­sions, which really worked for me, but which some read­ers may dis­like. To them, I would say to stick with it: the rea­sons why the book is struc­tured like it is will become clear. The Hun­dred Thou­sand King­doms lux­u­ri­ates in lan­guage, and Jemisin pushes the nar­ra­tive struc­ture in fas­ci­nat­ing ways. It’s a book that will reward reread­ing, I think, not just for the char­ac­ters (although they are won­der­ful) but also for the form of the novel itself.

On the other hand, there are two aspects of the book that I found some­what dis­sat­is­fy­ing. First is the char­ac­ter of Scim­ina, who is a card­board sort of vil­lain. Jemisin posted a spoil­ery dis­cus­sion of Scim­ina on her blog that explains why she made Scim­ina that way, and that expla­na­tion does slot things into place for me. But as a reader, I still felt some­what dis­ap­pointed when we got to the end of the book and never saw the sub­tlety in Scim­ina that we did in other characters.

The sec­ond dis­sat­is­fy­ing part of the book for me was what hap­pened with Yeine at the end: I don’t want to be too spe­cific because I don’t want to spoil the end­ing for any­one, but it seemed too pat and perfect.

Nev­er­the­less, I loved this book. I’m cer­tainly look­ing for­ward to the sequels!

You can read sam­ple chap­ters at N.K. Jemisin’s web­site.

GRADE: A–