![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katewritesSo, I bought Hundred Thousand around the time of race!fail, I think. I think because it was pointed to as a book that did really well in terms of not race failing.
And then I didn't read it for a year and some change.
Partially life, partially I read the back and was completely disinterested.
OH WAS I WRONG. The back is your stereotypical "revenge for parent's murder! Girl in intriguing plot with too many characters! Gods!" What the book is actually about is love.
Love that turns to hate, love that means a willingness to die, love that is unwanted, love that turns to hate and a love that is so desperate that it would rather be hated than ignored.
And also mothers. I was trying to put my finger on why I loved how mothers worked in this book, and I think it was because there's the normal way dead mothers work - the Supernatural way, where it destroys the fathers and children and there was the way dead mothers worked here where it meant a certainty and a drive and throwing yourself against impossible odds, but not with a deathwish.
Also, she really works hard to not make any of the mothers saintly in this book. Instead, all of the mothers are shown as being beautiful and cruel and gods in the eyes of their children. Early on, you realize (as does Yseine) that her impression of her mother was different from what her mother had been. But in her eyes, no matter what, Mother was god, even when it became apparent her mother had other plans for her.
Then I read the Broken Kingdoms, and it got BETTER.
This book is equally as delightful as The Hundred Thousand, although you can see the similarities. This is also told as one character telling a story to another, it's also about a girl who figures out she has power she didn't know about, a mortal who falls for gods, and so on. In a lot of ways it seems similar, but what drew me to it was that I liked Oree a lot more than Yseine.
I liked that she seemed "normal" and scared and in love and that she was empathetic, but also had a breaking point. On the one hand, she seemed to do less than Yseine, but then I figured out that that seemed a plot point in both: someone faced with forces controlling their destiny and only having a finite amount of awful options to choose from.
Jemisin does a good job of making the Bright Lord a sympathetic character. It's hard not to feel bad for someone so broken, even as we shied away from his complete disdain of people. There's a scene towards the middle where he admits that despite the fact that she cared for him and fed him and took him in, he actually didn't care at all about Oree. That was so in character that it made his earlier patheticness make much more sense.
This book also has a much more steady tension and building plot than Hundred Thousand. The latter had some large sections where not very much happens, but in this one, something is always happening, Oree is always fighting.
On the other hand, the ending kind of left me... I don't know. Not upset, it was a natural ending, but not exactly pleased, either.
I can't wait for the next one.
And then I didn't read it for a year and some change.
Partially life, partially I read the back and was completely disinterested.
OH WAS I WRONG. The back is your stereotypical "revenge for parent's murder! Girl in intriguing plot with too many characters! Gods!" What the book is actually about is love.
Love that turns to hate, love that means a willingness to die, love that is unwanted, love that turns to hate and a love that is so desperate that it would rather be hated than ignored.
And also mothers. I was trying to put my finger on why I loved how mothers worked in this book, and I think it was because there's the normal way dead mothers work - the Supernatural way, where it destroys the fathers and children and there was the way dead mothers worked here where it meant a certainty and a drive and throwing yourself against impossible odds, but not with a deathwish.
Also, she really works hard to not make any of the mothers saintly in this book. Instead, all of the mothers are shown as being beautiful and cruel and gods in the eyes of their children. Early on, you realize (as does Yseine) that her impression of her mother was different from what her mother had been. But in her eyes, no matter what, Mother was god, even when it became apparent her mother had other plans for her.
Then I read the Broken Kingdoms, and it got BETTER.
This book is equally as delightful as The Hundred Thousand, although you can see the similarities. This is also told as one character telling a story to another, it's also about a girl who figures out she has power she didn't know about, a mortal who falls for gods, and so on. In a lot of ways it seems similar, but what drew me to it was that I liked Oree a lot more than Yseine.
I liked that she seemed "normal" and scared and in love and that she was empathetic, but also had a breaking point. On the one hand, she seemed to do less than Yseine, but then I figured out that that seemed a plot point in both: someone faced with forces controlling their destiny and only having a finite amount of awful options to choose from.
Jemisin does a good job of making the Bright Lord a sympathetic character. It's hard not to feel bad for someone so broken, even as we shied away from his complete disdain of people. There's a scene towards the middle where he admits that despite the fact that she cared for him and fed him and took him in, he actually didn't care at all about Oree. That was so in character that it made his earlier patheticness make much more sense.
This book also has a much more steady tension and building plot than Hundred Thousand. The latter had some large sections where not very much happens, but in this one, something is always happening, Oree is always fighting.
On the other hand, the ending kind of left me... I don't know. Not upset, it was a natural ending, but not exactly pleased, either.
I can't wait for the next one.
