Review: The Broken Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy, Book 2)

[megwrites]

Title: The Broken Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy, Book 2)
Author: N.K. Jemisin (nojojojo; nkjemisin.com; @nkjemisin)
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Orbit





Basic Plotline: Oree, a blind artist, lives and works in Shadow, scraping together a living with her art. She has a godling for an ex-lover and a strange, silent undying houseguest, Shiny, living with her. When she discovers the dead body of the godling Role, things begin to unravel in Oree's life and she discovers not only the secrets that have been kept from her and a terrible plot that endangers all of creation, but things she didn't know about herself, things that could be terribly destructive in the wrong hands. SPOILERS IN REVIEW.



The Positives: I really liked the first book in this series, but I like this one even better, which is to say I loved it and it's now an instant favorite. This is one of those books that reminds me why the hell I love this genre and reading in general. I don't know whether it's that I connected more with Oree or that NK Jemisin continues to get better and better as a writer or just that it was nice to revisit the same setting from a less high up view point. Less political intriguing in this book may have contributed to why I liked it.

Oree makes for a deeply sympathetic narrator. She speaks to the audience with an easy way, at times funny and sly, at times warm, at times just open and honest without attempts to play for pity (or self-pity). There's a fundamental honesty about her that made her an attractive and compelling character in a universe which, as the first book shows, is full of powerful figures who are deeply, deeply untrustworthy and unstable. Likewise, the secondary characters felt real even when they were deeply unreal. Even such characters as Dump and Lil, who are obviously much more colorful than more human godlings like Madding, come across as being not just devices or scenery but true entities and people in their own strange right. The chemistry between these characters feels organic. The romances between Madding and then later Shiny/Itempas did not feel forced, but rather something that grew naturally.

The plot moves at a smooth, steady pace and does not take the predictable turns one might think it does. I was quite glad that Jemisin had Shiny's identity as Itempas revealed earlier rather than stringing it along when it was obvious to the reader from very early on and was, after a point, unmissable by Oree. I can't stress how much I'm impressed by the simple quality of a writer letting a character figure out what is obvious rather than relying on contrived circumstances or doubts to keep us believing that someone didn't even consider the possibility that Shiny is Itempas after all the big obvious clues thrown in the way. It seems like the fantasy genre likes to do this all too much. So I was very glad that the book just got on with it and let that storyline develop from there, because it was very interesting to see how Oree deals with knowing that her houseguest is one of the Three.

Seeing more of the worldbuilding in this was grand, as was exploring the Tree further and the way the world changed in the wake of the events in book one and how humanity has adapted to gods far better than it seems gods have adapted to them. There are a few moments of very sharp meditation on the nature of divinity and strangeness and humanity and personhood here in some offhanded statements that I appreciated. I was also glad that Jemisin kept the guest starring of the characters from the first book to a minimum since they were not strictly relevant to the plot. It isn't that I didn't like those characters, but often, when sequels are trying to focus on a new cast, bring back the old one makes me long for another story about those first people, not the new ones.

The ending is not precisely happy, and it stings, but it's also the ending that this book deserves, the not quite happy but happier than things were ending, because, as Oree never forgets, Shiny/Itempas has a lot of things to atone for and as much as Nahadoth or the Arameri, he is responsible for so much destruction.

The Negatives: I don't have any major negatives for this book that don't relate to the sections below. I have a few nitpicks, and my only real moment of not enjoying the book was the transcript in the back of an interview that didn't seem to really add anything to the story. It was in the back and tacked on after the story itself, after the appendix so it doesn't take way from the main event, which is Oree's story. The only other issue I'd bring up is that I wish that hadn't been a "saving the world" plot again, because it was nice to back away from high-level politics and power struggles and deal with something on a more common level. "Save the world/kingdom" stories are something that fantasy has more than enough of, and in a way, it's another way that fantasy devalues certain stories by requiring that a plot must affect the highest levels of power in order to be important, as if the struggles of common people who's goals might not save or damn the entire world could still be important enough for a novel, because what drew me in was the more common elements of Oree's life. She was just an artist, trying to get by. I noticed with glee in the back notes that NK Jemisin based some of that on the tables at Union Square here in NYC (a place I dearly love and am fond of).

CoC Score: 9.5/10. Jemisin populates her worlds with a wide variety of races and ethnicities and nationalities and reflects the tensions between them admirably. Fantasy has long had a problem with examining power and privileged classes and races of people from a standpoint where it is not always good or right or beneficial for there to be great power divisions. I appreciated this book because it discussed and, indeed, centered the less powerful peoples in Jemisin's world and discussed, through Oree and the gods, the effects of Arameri privilege on other peoples and the history that created this power vacuum and what the maintenance of that privilege entailed for others. While I wouldn't call this book a political tract or anything, it's nice to see that in a genre that likes to forget that such things as privilege and oppression exist, and that it isn't how things are and should be, that somebody at least remembers to think about such things when designing a world that is completely their own. I had some misgivings about the way the storyline of Oree's heritage (being a demon, descended from demons, as was her father) was handled, because I think it can be said to come uncomfortably close to story lines about people who are bi-racial or multiracial in real life. I think Jemisin avoids the worst of these sorts of trope, but I wasn't precisely comfortable with the idea that the blood of those descendants who were part god, part mortal being dangerous or deadly to the gods (the most powerful beings) while not particularly damaging to mortals (the least powerful beings) - that their existence was a blight to the gods, not mortals.

The one part of the plotline that seemed like it could have been left out or written around was this part, and while it didn't cause me not to enjoy the book and I think some of my unease was addressed when the gods, talking about how they had slaughtered their own children and started a war over these demons (I wasn't quite comfortable with the use of this word, especially since it seems to be a curse word in this world) and how they'd come to see it was wrong. I wish that in Nahadoth's constant urge to get revenged for Enefa's death and his own personal sufferings, he had stopped to consider that a lot more people were hurt (and killed and nearly wiped out) than just him and that maybe his sufferings were not the greatest of all.

Gender Score: 9/10. Aside from Oree herself, there wasn't exactly an overabundance of main female characters. Most of the action happens with Oree interacting with men or male-identified characters (Itempas, Madding, etc). The only really significant role besides hers is Serymn, the villain of the piece who is helping her husband, Dateh, in their plot to kill Nahadoth and she is the least developed of the characters. I would have liked to have seen Oree interact with more women and perhaps to have more women or female-identifying characters in the novel

GLBT Score: 5/10. There is some queerness by implication in this novel. Given that it's explicitly stated that Itempas, Nahadoth, and Enefa were all lovers, and the first two are identified male (at least in mortal form), that one can infer some queerness there. There's also some implication that three sellers in the market are a "triple", which I think means a threesome relationship and two of those people are identified as male. But there seems to be very little exploration of more than male and female in the genders of gods, especially given that some are very far from human in their shapes and behaviors. I would have liked to have seen a little more diversity in the gender expressions and identities of either the mortals or godlings, but especially the godlings. It seems like there'd be at least some of them that took neither male nor female identities for themselves even in mortal forms.

Ablism Score: 4 or 7/10. I feel inadequate to score this because it is a book that is about and centered on a blind woman, and I was acutely aware of the magical crip trope and tropes about blindness and magic while reading this book. And while I'm glad that someone wrote a book that's centered on a PWD, I'm also aware that not being a PWD, there might be a lot I don't get because privilege makes it easy for me to not be aware even when I want to get it. As reader who has only a mild visual impairment that's easily corrected with glasses, I'm not really in a position to judge how right or wrong this book would have read against the experience of actual blind people. I think Jemisin did keep an awareness of the tropes and stereotypes in this and there are times when I can see where she tries to subvert or work around them, but I don't feel like she did it perfectly. There were some moments when Oree seemed too visually oriented, even if she could see magical objects and beings with her eyes but not mundane ones, and some of the visual language used seemed like it was more appropriated for a sighted person than one who wasn't. Hence a dual score here, because I am totally open to the idea that there are a lot things I could've missed.