This review is going to contain minor spoilers for The Kingdom of Gods, book three in NK Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy. I feel a powerful need to rant right now, after finishing the novel.
Quick plot summary: child trickster god Sieh gets in trouble and has his life intertwined with a couple of mortals. Things go badly.
Reading this book was a little difficult for me, because for a pretty major part of it I didn’t like the main character.
Actually, let me clarify that. I like Sieh as a character. And when he’s being a merry little trickster, I love him. I do, however, very much dislike him as a person.
There are some books where the protagonist does terrible, awful things, and you root for them anyway because it’s politics, or intrigue, or a weird grimdark world. And then there’s this book, where the main character murders thirty innocent people in a temper tantrum, including named characters that we’d gotten to know and who I liked a hell of a lot more than Sieh. And afterwards, the book expects me to still find Sieh charming and care about his love life and emotional state. And the other characters in the story, these people who knew and, in many cases, grew up with these murdered innocents, forgive him way too easily.
Everyone’s line is different. Sieh found mine. I spent a long time unable to forgive him for that one scene of slaughter, and that kind of poisoned everything else for me.
Right up until the very end, at least. Credit where credit is due, the story came back together for me in time for the climax. And it’s a hell of a climax, to be sure. This book is definitely worth reading, if only for the ending.
This series was really interesting to read. The first book looks a lot like the usual fish-out-of-water-in-court-intrigue scenario, but the series isn’t really about that. It’s about these gods, and the fallout from their arguments with each other. I said at the end of my review of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that it felt like a complete story in itself, and I wasn’t sure where the story would go from there–well, it turns out that the subsequent books were there to answer all the questions that I’m used to letting go unanswered at the end of a good novel. Instead of just leaving you with the old “And the adventure continues!” bullshit, Nemisin tells you what happens next. Which I really do appreciate.
This is a world that I quite like, but would hate to live in. Too many gods and godlings running around causing chaos and death without any real consequences. I’m certainly glad that I was able to visit, though.