#monstrous characters

A-: while the characters were a tad dramatic for my taste, everything about this book was so iconic I didn't even mind.

Zeitan is living a miserable existence on the frontier, threatened by monstrous aliens and mourning the sister murdered by the celebrity pilot of a Chrysalis, monster-fighting machines infamous for killing girls. So Zeitan leaves her family and her lover Yizhi to go kill him, and along the way ends up teaming up with a murderer, killing a ton of other people, and shaking Huaxia up forever.

B+ (yeah I’m doing letter grades now baby! I’ve decided I hate the 5-star system so I'm officially making my own way in the world)

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. (from the Goodreads page)

I am a big fan of Jemisin’s work, so it was really cool to see how her style and skill has developed. This book isn’t nearly as strong as some of her other work I’ve read, but is still a good time. Anyone who’s read her other work and liked it will appreciate this.

Props for just... monstrous characters! Jemisin has this gift for terrible people, which is half not shying away from the terrible things they do and half making them more than the terrible things they do. This story is full of gods who don’t fall into mortal morality and it was horrifying and fun to read about them. Even our main, Yeine, is a little bit of a monster - she could so easily be the villain of someone else’s story, and she’s got this wonderful pragmatism about it.

Also props for my other favourite Jemisin trope, which is narrators that give something to the story. It’s told in first person, but as you keep reading you realize that Yeine is wonderfully aware of the audience as she reflects on her past... and then you realize it isn’t us she’s aware of, but some other audience. 

I think some parts were a bit more awkward - too much sex and not enough attention paid to the worldbuilding or minor characters - but it’s a strong start I’m excited to read more of!

Plot: good. I don’t like when books happen over too short a time for character and relationship development to feel authentic, and this one takes place over two weeks, which is a bit on the short side. I loved how much time Jemisin spent fleshing out the backstories of the gods and the story of Yeine’s mother giving up her power. I think they were more interesting than Yeine’s own story at times, although I think if Jemisin had focused more on them they would have crumpled.

Characters: they’re all so terrible, I love it. Even Sieh, the child-god I want to protect from the cruelties of the world, is also a fair amount monstrous. The relationships between the three main gods is terrible and fascinating and I can’t wait for it to be fleshed out in the next book because it is an A+ concept. I wish more time had been spent on some of the more minor characters: the two other captive gods, the two other heirs, because they end up quite involved in the climax and I could appreciate it fully because I hadn’t realized I was supposed to be paying attention to them ahead of time.

Setting: fantastic concepts, lacking in detail. From Sky, the floating city staffed by the royal family’s bastards, to the pantheon of gods, to Yiene’s own matriarchal home of Darr, to the rest of the hundred thousand kingdoms - there is so much to explore here. But Jemisin tends to gloss over it, not really telling us the details I found myself craving. You get the sense of a debut author having bitten off a bit more than they can chew, and in balancing between revealing boring details and revealing too little has decided to err on the side of caution and reveal too little.

Prose: you can see the beginnings of Jemisin’s style developing, and it’s great. While her quotes aren’t quite Fifth Season-level (have any of us ever forgotten the first time they read that ‘This is how the world ends’ passage?) there are some bangers here. “It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all - but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”