Book: The Broken Kingdoms
Aug. 7th, 2011 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: NK Jemisin (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nojojojo)
Details: (c) 2010 NK Jemisin; Pub Hachette Digital 2010; ISBN 978-0-748-11713-0
Verdict: The Broken Kingdoms is a satisfying sequel, but doesn't really deliver anything new.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed the first volume, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, enough to want more.
How it came into my hands: Books on Board, which is pretty much where I get SF/F ebooks I'm willing to pay full price for.
The Broken Kingdoms is very much the middle book of a trilogy. It's a good trilogy, and I'll probably get the concluding part too, but it doesn't really do much beyond telling you what happened in the aftermath of the extremely dramatic events at the end of tHTK. The worldbuilding is still cool, but it's a bit less fresh and shiny now that it's further exploration of the same world that we met in tHTK. And yeah, I was interested to see how ordinary people live after the first book was set among the royal family and their court, but there isn't much that's new and startling about it. I did like the exploration of the World Tree and its effects on life in Shadow, but the Maro culture is a lot less vivid than the Darre culture of the previous book.
Oree is ok as a viewpoint character, but she has many of the same problems as Yeine, she's not really solid and seems to be mostly a vehicle for telling the story. Also the thing with the blind character who has mystical vision has been done to death; I suppose it's something that said character is the protagonist rather than the sidekick or magical guru, and there's some attempt to actually depict the realities of living life as a blind person, rather than just having the magic make all the issues go away.
The gods and the sense of the numinous are still very good; I particularly liked the relatively minor godling characters, Lil the goddess of hunger and Dump the god of discarded things. The thing about the experience of a mortal being in a relationship with a god is still well-written, but again doesn't add much new after Yeine and Nahadoth. And the reveal at the very end of the book makes the rather detailed sex scenes seem a bit icky, really. The development of Itempas both as a character and as an ineffable divine force is the best thing about tBK, but it's not quite enough to make the book really stand out. I compared tHTK to Bujold's Chalion series, and this is even more similar, with the switch to a different main god and a whole lot of stuff about eating demons.
The human politics aspects of it didn't really work for me. The stakes are supposed to be high but emotionally I didn't really buy the danger to the whole cosmos. And it's hard to follow the high climax of tHTK with any other jeopardy and keep the reader invested. I didn't entirely care about the various cults and the jockeying for position within the Arameri, and I had a hard time believing that anything irretrievably bad would happen to Oree, let alone to the pantheon. Still, none of the flaws are fatal, I'm complaining that tBK fails to be brilliant (other than a few flashes), not that it's awful.
nojojojo)Details: (c) 2010 NK Jemisin; Pub Hachette Digital 2010; ISBN 978-0-748-11713-0
Verdict: The Broken Kingdoms is a satisfying sequel, but doesn't really deliver anything new.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed the first volume, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, enough to want more.
How it came into my hands: Books on Board, which is pretty much where I get SF/F ebooks I'm willing to pay full price for.
The Broken Kingdoms is very much the middle book of a trilogy. It's a good trilogy, and I'll probably get the concluding part too, but it doesn't really do much beyond telling you what happened in the aftermath of the extremely dramatic events at the end of tHTK. The worldbuilding is still cool, but it's a bit less fresh and shiny now that it's further exploration of the same world that we met in tHTK. And yeah, I was interested to see how ordinary people live after the first book was set among the royal family and their court, but there isn't much that's new and startling about it. I did like the exploration of the World Tree and its effects on life in Shadow, but the Maro culture is a lot less vivid than the Darre culture of the previous book.
Oree is ok as a viewpoint character, but she has many of the same problems as Yeine, she's not really solid and seems to be mostly a vehicle for telling the story. Also the thing with the blind character who has mystical vision has been done to death; I suppose it's something that said character is the protagonist rather than the sidekick or magical guru, and there's some attempt to actually depict the realities of living life as a blind person, rather than just having the magic make all the issues go away.
The gods and the sense of the numinous are still very good; I particularly liked the relatively minor godling characters, Lil the goddess of hunger and Dump the god of discarded things. The thing about the experience of a mortal being in a relationship with a god is still well-written, but again doesn't add much new after Yeine and Nahadoth. And the reveal at the very end of the book makes the rather detailed sex scenes seem a bit icky, really. The development of Itempas both as a character and as an ineffable divine force is the best thing about tBK, but it's not quite enough to make the book really stand out. I compared tHTK to Bujold's Chalion series, and this is even more similar, with the switch to a different main god and a whole lot of stuff about eating demons.
The human politics aspects of it didn't really work for me. The stakes are supposed to be high but emotionally I didn't really buy the danger to the whole cosmos. And it's hard to follow the high climax of tHTK with any other jeopardy and keep the reader invested. I didn't entirely care about the various cults and the jockeying for position within the Arameri, and I had a hard time believing that anything irretrievably bad would happen to Oree, let alone to the pantheon. Still, none of the flaws are fatal, I'm complaining that tBK fails to be brilliant (other than a few flashes), not that it's awful.
