Welcome to the Book Bonfire! You, dear reader, get to spend another lovely afternoon with yours truly. I hope you brought a lot of peanut butter pretzels. Today we will be discussing The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. Holy bejesus, that’s a lot of kingdoms!

I was really excited for this book. I heard nothing but fantastic, positive criticism of Jemisin, especially with respect to her Broken Earth trilogy. BUT, since I’m a fool of the highest order and degree, I have to read an author’s body of work in chronological order like a complete wackaloon. Thus, I start with the Inheritance trilogy, and I start with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I greatly enjoyed the first 50 – 100 pages or so. As the world was building, the political strife was heightening, and the weird relationship with the enslaved gods got fleshed out, I was getting excited about where the story may have been going. It wasn’t much like anything I’ve read before, so I had a bit of a thrill in the sense that literally anything could happen.

Then I started to get put off. The enslaved gods are creepy and weirdly sexual. The main character, Yeine, engages in weirdly sexual interactions, both flagrant and borderline, with the enslaved gods. The political intrigue wasn’t very intriguing, mostly shallow and petty. The worldbuilding plateaued, and it felt like the entire story was taking place in a single room. The writing started to get overdramatic. Yeine’s stomach would sink during critical revelations, or her jaw would drop in horror, or the magnitude of some realization would be too much to handle. Constantly. And it never felt like anything was worth getting too worked up about. She would just sit in a room while characters talked to her and she would just be constantly… reacting. Reacting strongly, sure, but just reacting. This was supposed to be the main character and she didn’t seem to have any agency in her own story.

In a nutshell, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms focuses on Yeine Darr, a “barbarian” woman from a kingdom to the north. She is summoned to what I suppose is the ruling kingdom after her mother’s mysterious death. She is named heir to the hundred thousand kingdoms and needs to fight her two horribly shitty cousins for the throne: Jean-Ralphio and Mona Lisa Saperstein. There’s a class system of the ruling Arameri family based on blood purity which barely comes into play. There are three main gods: Nahadoth, the night guy, Bright Itempas, the day guy, and Enefa, the sorta day sorta night lady. They are siblings who also probably fucked each other, as gods are wont to do. They all have a falling out, with Enefa dead, Nahadoth fallen, and Itempas the last remaining god. Nahadoth and his children are enslaved by the family, and nobody fucks with the family with gods at their disposal. No sir.

This all seems somewhat interesting, because it is. On paper, it should be a fantastic story. In practice, though (which is also on paper, book-style), it’s very dry. The murder mystery element of Yeine’s mother is not treated with any arousal of curiosity. The plot threads are uninspired and predictable. The saving grace is the idea of the plot, where you have essentially two dysfunctional families (the Arameris and the gods) dealing with their own dysfunctions, but this is carried on the shoulders of uninteresting and shallow characters. There’s also a romantic element between Nahadoth and Yeine that I just couldn’t buy into. It felt very sleazy and gross, superfluous and not contributing to the story in any meaningful way.

There was just so much potential that seemed lost. I heard things pick up in Book 2, but after slogging through Book 1 I’m not clamoring to continue the series right now. Maybe some day.

BOOK BONFIRE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS!

Did you find Yeine’s character satisfying?
Pffft, no. I didn’t like her at all. I thought she was a little high and mighty and, as I said already, very reactive in her position. The story just seemed to happen around her and she was just there to take it in and accept what happened.

Now, if by “satisfying” one means how her character gets to end as a goddess, then I absolutely did not find her character satisfying to an extreme. She spends half the book “accepting” her fate of death, and when death finally comes… she instead doesn’t die and instead gets to be a goddess. The spirit of Enefa living on or blah blah blah. It was awfully convenient, wasn’t it? She didn’t deserve it. She deserved to be miserable and alone for being woefully boring. Not satisfying! Boo and hiss!

How did you feel about the following themes: corruption of power, matriarchal vs. patriarchal societies, and race relations?
Really? What a boring question! Wow, a book about a dysfunctional family willing to kill each other to obtain the throne. A tale as old as thrones, my friend. Matriarchal vs. patriarchal societies? SAME AS IT IS ON EARTH, MAN. Darr is a matriarchal society and the Darre are seen as barbaric, just like… uh… *checks Wikipedia* …the Padaungs of Myanmar? And race relations? Are we talking humans versus gods? Darre vs. Arameri? Mexicans vs. Canadians? Well, Yeine is a mutt of sorts. Somewhat Arameri, mostly Darre, treated like shit. Just like Earth, man. It’s almost as if Jemisin drew inspiration from Earth to develop her societal and political constructs! How about that for analysis?

What are your thoughts about the world-building?
Meh. This could have been so much better. Jemisin writes whole blog posts detailing the intricacies of the world and of the people, but why supplement the books with this stuff instead of actually incorporating it into the novel? Everything is from Yeine’s point of view, but she never leaves Sky. There’s a whole world out there and we only see and understand a sliver. Barely. How am I supposed to get immersed in the mythology when I need to read Jemisin’s blog to get more out of the story?

She obviously put a lot of thought into building the world, but it doesn’t show. Sorry.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Oof. Well, I read that the second book is a little bit better than the first, so I’m willing to eventually keep going on this. It oddly kept me turning the pages even if I didn’t find the story gripping, which means it was a fairly light read. I admire Jemisin and I’m looking forward to eventually hitting the Broken Earth series.

L’chaim, as the kids say. If you’ve got FOMO and want to hit everything, man, then this book is a real gas.

I don’t even know what I’m saying. Over and out.