Review: The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin

The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin

Published: Orbit, 2011

Series: Book 3 of the Inheritance Trilogy

Awards Nominated: Nebula Award

Spoiler warning! This is the 3^rd book of a series, and past this point there are some major spoilers of the first book (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms)!

The Book:

“After Yeine’s rise to godhood and the freeing of the enslaved gods, the Arameri family’s power  is on the decline. Years later, the godling of childhood Sieh may now be free, but he is still confined by his fundamental nature and haunted by the betrayal and torture he has endured.  As the oldest of the godlings, he is also very alone—not powerful enough to be one of the Three, but still separate from his younger siblings.

In his loneliness, he meets and cautiously befriends twin Arameri children, Dekarta and Shahar.  However, when they attempt to swear an innocent pact of friendship, something much stranger and more dangerous occurs. While Sieh and others attempt to make sense of what has happened to them, secrets from the past are beginning to come to light—secrets which threaten not only Sieh’s life, but the existence of the entire universe.” ~Allie

With this book, I believe that I’ve read all of N.K. Jemisin’s published novels!  It looks like she’s going to have another book for a new series in 2015, The Fifth Season, so I’m looking forward to that coming out. I read this novel with a group read-along, and you can find our spoiler-filled discussions here: 1,2,3,4,5. This novel fits into my “I Just HAVE to Read More of That Author” Challenge, the “Fantasia” Challenge, and “The Second Best” Challenge (as a Nebula nominee).

My Thoughts:

The Kingdom of Gods takes place years after the events of the first two novels, and the main character is the godling of childhood, Sieh.  I thought he was a really interesting protagonist, but he’s not extremely sympathetic. He’s the oldest of the godlings, but he obeys his nature by deliberately behaving in childish, bratty ways.  By his words, he always “does what feels good” in the moment, which is not always great for the people around him.  He also indulges in quite a bit of adolescent melodrama, and he often lingers over his desperate loneliness and desire to be loved.  I really appreciated that his flaws were not glossed over by the story, or easily forgiven by the characters within it. I also really enjoy these kinds of capricious, faux-childlike characters, and I felt like his loneliness and whining were understandable, given what he’d suffered during his long life.

It’s Sieh’s loneliness that prompts him to initially begin his friendship with the other two major characters, Shahar and Dekarta Arameri.  Together, the three of them learn about friendship, love, and how to deal with hurting or being hurt by the ones you love.  However, I sometimes felt like they didn’t spend enough time together to really support the intensity of their connection.  Their relationship was not exactly instant-love (it was a bit more complicated), but it was somewhere in that area.  Aside from Sieh and his friends, a number of old characters also make reappearances in the novel, and I enjoyed seeing what had happened to them in the intervening years.

While I did enjoy the story, I think that it was a little less focused at times than the previous two novels.  For instance, I felt like the personal story of Sieh didn’t always gel especially well with the larger political and cosmic plots that were happening around him.  I can’t say the larger developments were not foreshadowed, but many of the main players were new and only very lightly developed.  The story was still really entertaining, though, and I especially liked how various characters arcs echoed different ideas.  There was a lot of examination of parent-child relationships, and of how being harmed does not excuse one from taking actions that harm another. Especially in Sieh’s case, the story also examined the conflict between the need to grow, change, and heal, and the need to remain true to oneself.  I thought all of this came together beautifully in the climax and resolution of the story.

My Rating: 4/5

The Kingdom of Gods was a fitting conclusion to an enjoyable trilogy. The story features the godling Sieh, who does his best to behave like a child. I adored his narration and his carefully impetuous nature, but I can see how he could be a difficult character to like.  The novel combined the personal story of Sieh’s loneliness with some more momentous schemes, and I didn’t always feel like the two fit together especially well. Even so, I really enjoyed how everything came together in the end, and I also enjoyed seeing a bit of how life had turned out for some of the characters from previous novels. I’m looking forward to N.K. Jemisin’s next book!

Review: The Islanders, by Christopher Priest

The Islanders by Christopher Priest

Published : Gollancz, 2011

Awards Won : BSFA Award and Campbell Memorial Award

The Book :

“A tale of murder, artistic rivalry, and literary trickery; a Chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems; a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you.

The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. 

The Islanders serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands; an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder; and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator.” ~WWEnd.com

This is only the second novel I’ve read by Christopher Priest, and the first was The Prestige.  I really enjoyed both the book and film of The Prestige, though they had their differences.  I’d always meant to read more of his work.

My Thoughts:

The Islanders is presented as a guide to the Dream Archipelago, and it contains chapters describing various islands, ordered alphabetically. The Dream Archipelago is an uncertain, contradictory kind of place, and the structure of the novel reflects that.  It is a place that can’t be seen as a whole, due to temporal distortions, and so, like the reader, the inhabitants have to build a sense of their world from experiences and disjointed information. Many pieces of the puzzle are also suspect or inconsistent.  For example, this is a book whose fictional introduction is written by a character that dies within its pages. Since I haven’t read many of Christopher Priest’s novels, I’m not sure exactly where this novel fits into his larger body of work.  There are other works that feature the Dream Archipelago, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything crucial by reading The Islanders first.

The novel makes for a very odd kind of travel guide, since the information provided for each island varies greatly.  Some islands’ sections contain only geographical and cultural descriptions, others have complete short stories, and still others contain transcripts of interviews or correspondences.  Some chapters, like the one about the horrific insects named thrymes, were pretty exciting in their own right, but I was most impressed by how the different sections interlinked with one another.  For instance, one section contained a one-sided conversation of letters between an aspiring novelist and a famous writer Chaster Kammeston.  Though her letters seem perfectly friendly and polite, information later revealed about Kammeston highlights how many of his buttons she managed to innocently push.  I loved how the book became progressively more complicated as there was more information to mentally cross-reference, and I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between chapters to remind myself of small details.

The novel offers many tantalizing puzzles, but it does not provide any solutions.  If you’re expecting any kind of resolution or conclusion resolves the mysteries and ties together the different plotlines, then you will be disappointed.  There are enough clues, though, for the reader to come up with their own theories, and it is also left to the reader to decide on what meaning, if any, the overall work holds. For one example, there is never any revelation about the true circumstances of the murder, mentioned in the novel’s description. However, there’s enough information scattered throughout the novel to give a pretty good idea of what happened.  I can see how this style of novel would not be to everyone’s taste, but I had a lot of fun trying to see how everything fit together!  

My Rating: 4/5

The Islanders is more of a puzzle than a conventional novel.  It is presented as a tourist’s guide to the Dream Archipelago, and it contains a story, description, correspondence, or other shortwork for a variety of islands, ordered alphabetically by name.  I liked how the various sections linked to one another, and how information gained later in the novel could change the interpretation of previous chapters.  I thought it was a lot of fun piecing larger stories together from the information scattered throughout the different islands’ sections.  There is really nothing in the way of a conclusion, though, so the larger picture only exists within the readers’ minds.  Like the cartographers that draw maps from the Archipelago’s wandering drones, the reader is left to construct their view of The Islanders by building connections between many disjointed pieces of information.   

Review: Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey (Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham)

Published : Orbit, 2012

Series : Book 2 of the Expanse

Awards Nominated : Locus SF

The Book :

“On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system.

In the vast wilderness of space, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have been keeping the peace for the Outer Planets Alliance. When they agree to help a scientist search war-torn Ganymede for a missing child, the future of humanity rests on whether a single ship can prevent an alien invasion that may have already begun…” ~The Expanse Wiki 

I loved the first novel of this series, and it has taken me entirely too long to get around to book 2!  I was hoping that I’d be able to read Abaddon’s Gate before the next one comes out (this June), but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Also, it looks like Syfy is picking up this series as a television show, so here’s hoping they do it justice!

My Thoughts:

Caliban’s War occurs in the aftermath of the events of Leviathan Wakes, and it features a number of the same characters. It also seems to repeat many of the same beats as the first novel in the series—missing daughter, alien protomolecule, vomit zombies, etc.—but, given how much I enjoyed the first novel, a little repetition did not deter my enjoyment of the continuing story. I still find it impressive that this novel was written by two authors, since their writing seems to merge seamlessly at this point.  I could pick out Abraham’s point-of-view character in Leviathan Wakes, but I honestly couldn’t tell who wrote which character this time around.       

Speaking of the viewpoint characters, Caliban's War features four.  Jim Holden remains from the first novel, though he’s been going through a rough patch after his traumatic experiences in the previous novel.  Holden has lost his idealistic certainty, and I was much more engaged with his search for how to live as a good person.  I also still love the rest of the Rocinante crew, and I really enjoyed the direction the novel took Holden and Naomi’s relationship.  The viewpoint character Prax Meng, a scientist desperately searching for his missing daughter, was an interesting counterpoint to Holden and his crew.  After the callousness of Julie Mao’s parents, it was refreshing to see Prax’s devotion to his daughter.

The other two additions are Bobbie, the Martian marine, and Avasarala, the foul-mouthed, elderly politician. Bobbie was a pretty simple, straightforward character, but it was refreshing to see a macho fighter character portrayed as a woman.  As for Avasarala, I found her political skill a little unconvincing, but I assumed she must have been more charismatic on her climb up the ladder of power. I thought the simplistic Earth-Mars politics angle of the story was one of its weaker points, but watching Bobbie and Avasarala interact livened up the plotline considerably.  In fact, altogether, I really enjoyed the interactions of the characters, and the complementarity of their various perspectives.

While the plot does bear some similarities to Leviathan Wakes, it's still entertaining in its own right.   The story has a good balance of humor, horror, action and adventure, and the heroes are faced again with a potential disaster for the human race.  Also, the search for Meng’s daughter gave the story a more personal, emotional push than Miller’s obsession with finding Julie.  However, There were a few areas that seemed a little weaker.  The main plot was more political, and the machinations were a too blatant for my tastes.  Following from this, I thought that the villains were a little too mustache-twirling, shortsighted, and unintelligent.  All the same, the novel was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s up with the protomolecule in Abaddon’s Gate.

My Rating: 4/5

Caliban’s War is a thoroughly entertaining addition to The Expanse saga. Holden and his crew return as major characters, and I enjoyed them just as much this time around.  There are also a number of interesting new viewpoint characters, which provide perspectives from a scientific community, the military, and the political sphere.  However, the novel repeats a lot of the successful notes of the first novel of the series, the politics are a little obvious, and the villains are pretty one-dimensional.  Despite that, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement, horror, action and humor, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for the crew of the Rocinante!