From the Stacks: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemison

Wow, and here we are at the first VF book club review of the year. I'm hoping to be able to keep up with reading their book pick each month and have it as my final review, but writing and finances might get in the way. Still, I was able to finish off the January pick because I bought it over a year ago and somehow never got around to it, a shame since it was a pretty darn good read.

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.

Overall Rating: 4.5/5

Plot: This was a fun and interesting pick for the VF book club, because the book seemed to focus a bit more on the political side than the romantic side. It took a long time for the romance to appear and even then it took some time before there were any love/sex scenes. Now look, I don't need to have lots of smutty scenes to make a romance worthwhile, but sometimes those books do somewhat cheer me up, because romances practically always end with a happily ever after (or a happily for now, whatever). I did like the political scheming but I also feel that it could have been developed a bit more. There were a couple of mysteries brought up near the beginning of the novel, such as who killed Yeine's mom, and they drew out that mystery until about the very end, which was both nice and frustrating. Having not met her mom and only getting tiny bits and pieces of past memories and such, I didn't find it to be all that important. But I did like the intrigue of figuring out which of the gods was telling the truth and which were lying and whether or not to trust the other heirs to the throne. 

I found another review of this book that summed up the plot of the gods rather nicely and I'll try to paraphrase it. Basically it is the story of three gods, who for simplicity's sake we will call Order, Chaos, and Balance. Taking elements of both Order and Chaos, Balance created the world. But since Order, Chaos, and Balance were also siblings they had their fights and long story short, Order killed Balance and then enslaved Chaos as well as the children of the gods, forcing them to obey the Arameri (humans). Obviously the lack of Balance in the world caused problems, and this story is really about the world sort of beginning again, with a new Balance being created. I'll probably read the other two books when I have the time and some extra cash.

Characters: Yeine seemed capable in some respects but pathetic in others. I get that she had never been to Sky before and therefore didn't know how they operated, but she seemed to be led around quite a bit by the other characters. And once she figured out that she was only named an heir so she could be the sacrifice that named the true heir, she spent quite some time just accepting that and not fighting for her own life, which seemed to contradict her "barbarian" lifestyle.

I thought Nahadoth (he would be the Chaos I mentioned earlier) was a really intriguing character. He had so much depth to him and you never really knew if you were going to get the dark beast side of him or the gentle and almost human side. It was mostly for him that I kept reading the story in the beginning.

The other worthwhile character in my mind was Sieh. He was also a god, and one who was very childlike and actually spent a lot of time in the form of a child. It was because of her fondness for the boy that Yeine actually had a few moments where she fought to protect and save others, so Sieh was nice to have around. Plus, he was one of the ones who helped Yeine get around and taught her a lot of what happens in Sky.

Get Your Own Copy: B&N, Amazon, BAM, Kobo, Audible