The Inheritance Trilogy, N.K. Jemisin

 The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (re-read)

The Broken Kingdoms (re-read)

The Kingdom of Gods (finally reading)

Nine years ago I read the first book in this trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, about a young woman summoned to her mother's homeland, to learn she is now one of the candidates to succeed her grandfather as the head of the titular kingdoms. But she also learns that she is intended to be the sacrifice that brings one of her cousins to the real power. Things don't quite work out as her grandfather intended, and in the process, some powerful and vengeful gods are freed from enslavement to her family.

This was the first book I read by N.K. Jemisin, and I've just learned it was her first book published. I was so blown away by the book, the world she created, and her characters. I immediately inhaled the second book, The Broken Kingdoms, where a woman living in the capital city of the capital kingdom takes in a fallen god. An artist, she is blind, but she can see his power. With him she is drawn into a mystery about who is murdering godlings, and what role the magic in her art might play, amid the rise of a new religious group. I loved this story even more, because of the main character Oree. I never wrote about it though, perhaps because I immediately started the third book, The Kingdom of Gods.

I don't remember exactly why after all these years, but I gave up on the third book very quickly. I not only gave up reading it, I gave it away to the library sales. It's honestly a bit frustrating not to remember why I took such exception to it. The other day I got a sudden urge to revisit these stories, and a determination to try the final book again. The first two were as good as I remembered, and the last book? I'm also frustrated with myself for missing such a great story. 

The Kingdom of Gods has as its main character Sieh the Trickster, a godling who plays a major part in the first story. He is a god of childhood, usually appearing as a child. In this story he meets a mortal girl and boy, later heirs to the kingdoms. He swears an oath of friendship with them, which has the appalling consequence of making him mortal, and aging at an accelerated rate. At the same time a dangerous new godling has appeared, who wants to overthrow the existing hierarchy of gods and rule alone - but that will destroy the mortal world.

These stories are definitely not cozy fantasy. There is on-page violence, people and groups seen as lesser are abused and sacrificed, the enslaved gods suffer physical and sexual abuse, and the gods mate among themselves in ways that qualify as incest in the human world (gender is fluid for many of them). I sometimes find N.K. Jemisin's stories too bleak, but the Inheritance Trilogy has a permanent place on my shelves - all three books, now.

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin

This book just knocked me sideways. It's the first of a series, and I realized half-way through that the second book isn't coming out until August. It's going to be a long five months. I mean, how often do you read a book with first lines like this?

    Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
    First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche's broken little body with a blanket - except his face, because he is afraid of the dark - and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She's old hat at this by now. . .
    But you need context. Let's try the ending again, writ continentally.
    Here is a land.

The end comes - and this is all in the Prologue, mind you - when a man stands outside a great city. He gather forces from below and around and above him.

    He takes all that, the strata and the magma and the people and the power, in his imaginary hands. Everything. He holds it. He is not alone. The earth is with him.
    Then he breaks it. . .
     Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. The line's origin point is the city of Yumenes.
    The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. The wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its line to bisect the Stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks.

This ushers in a Fifth Season, "an extended winter - lasting at least six months" according to the glossary in the back of the book. I didn't find that appendix until I'd finished the book. I had figured that the Fifth Season must be a deadly one, outside the normal round of time, which this one certainly will be.

We learn later that there are people in this land (the Stillness) who like the unnamed man of the prologue can pull and direct energy from the earth or other matter. The official term for these people is "orogene," but they are usually called "roggas" by those who hate and fear them. Children who show orogenic talent may be sent to the Fulcrum in Yumenes, where they are taught to control and use the talents, to stop earthquakes for example. Some orogenes try to mask their power, to blend in with their communities. But the gift (or the curse) is genetic, and children often give themselves away before they learn to hide it.

There are several strands to this story, which moves back and forth in time from the end of the world. We learn more about the woman mourning her dead son, who must also deal with the cataclysm unleashed by the broken earth. There is another child, from an earlier time, whose power manifests itself one day in the school yard. Her frantic parents lock her in the barn while they notify the authorities. And we follow an older orogene, sent from the Fulcrum to deal with a problem in a coastal community. It took me a little while to orient myself in this world, and to sort out the different strands of the story. But I found each of them so compelling that the switches between them caught me by surprise. I was sometimes tempted to peek ahead, to follow a particular story a bit further - but I resisted. I had an idea that a couple of them might come together in the end, but there were twists that I didn't see coming. I reached the last page without realizing it, mislead by the appendices and some teaser chapters from other books. I wasn't prepared for the story to end, and I was left feeling a bit bereft. I've had a hard time settling down with another book since- my heart and mind are still back in the unstill Stillness. I have already pre-ordered the next book. There are mysteries to be explained, and I want to know what happens next!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin

It feels like N.K. Jemisin's name has been coming up a lot lately, in blog reviews and also in the controversy over this year's Hugo Awards.  (She wrote about the latter on her website, back in April.)  I decided to start with her "Inheritance trilogy," because I thought the first book sounded very intriguing.  Here's a summary from Amazon:

     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 with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.
     With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate - and gods and mortals - are bound inseparably together. 

The King here is her grandfather, Dekarta Arameri.  Her mother Kinneth was heiress to the throne, before she met a young man from barbarian Darre and married him.  Her father cut her out of the succession, but now he wants her daughter to take her place.  The Arameri control the Consortium, the official governing body of the kingdoms.  Their power relies on a secret weapon, or rather four of them: gods bound into human form, the losers in a heavenly war, and bound to serve the Arameri.

This book more than lived up to its promise.  I read it in a day, fascinated with the vivid world that N.K. Jemisin created and her characters, both mortal and immortal.  Yeine, who narrates the story, is our introduction to that world, and our guide.  But she is as new to Sky - and to its power struggles - as we are. We discover it as she does, seeing it through her eyes, and knowing only what she knows - which isn't enough.  But she is strong and quick to learn, loyal and honorable, and I so enjoyed watching her story unfold, though I was often afraid for her.

I am always interested in the religions that some science fiction and fantasy authors create for their worlds. I particularly enjoy it when the gods and goddesses play a part in the story.  Among my favorites are those in Lois McMaster Bujold's Five Gods series, who interact with their believers and sometimes act through them (the Bastard has such fun with his acolytes).  This book is packed with gods, who are a big part of the story.  But I had no sense of the role that they play in the larger world.  There are references to the priests of Itempas Skyfather, the god of day and light, who vanquished his brother Nahadoth, the Nightlord, and killed their sister Enefa, goddess of dawn and dusk, to reign alone in the Age of the Bright.  I wanted to know more, about how people live with their god(s), what their rituals and beliefs are.  But then this is a story of the Arameri, living far above their subjects, and cheek to jowl with their gods.  Maybe I'll find out more in the other two books of the trilogy, which I have already ordered.

I looked for N.K. Jemisin's books at the library this weekend, but I didn't find any on the shelves.  Saturday night I was in the Google Play Store, checking some books that had been recommended earlier that day at our Jane Austen meeting.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that you get several chapters of books in their free samples.  That was my undoing, when I finally got around to putting N.K. Jemisin's name in the search box.  By the time I finished the four free chapters, I was well and truly hooked, and not just because the last chapter ended mid-sentence.  So much so that I ended up buying an e-version of the book, which I've never done before - but I really wanted to find out what happened next to Yeine.  I did find the format frustrating in reading this, though.  It is such a complex story, with layers of politics and religion and relationships, not to mention its unfamiliar world.  I kept wanting to flip back to check something - even more than usual.  It's partly my lack of practice with the format, but I found it hard to navigate back and forth, and to find the parts I wanted to re-read. I've ordered a print copy of this one as well.  I see there are also a couple of novellas in the series (only available in e-versions), as well as other stories that N.K. Jemisin has written.  I'm so looking forward to exploring her worlds.