The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
by N.K. Jemisin
First posted April 2017
Some people are dealing with the CV-19 pandemic by increasing their productivity: more reading; more writing; more drawing; etc.
I am not one of those people.
Even reading through this 2017 review felt daunting. This is lightly edited due to ennui. It still links back to goodreads.com pages to reviews I haven’t migrated yet. Less care than a book of this caliber deserves, to be honest.
Kingdoms is the pinnacle of standard high fantasy, a distillate of Campell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. It is a bellwether to whether you’ll like any other fantasy book on the market. If you don’t know if magic is the right genre for you, start here. Because it simply doesn’t get any better.
I tell you this upfront because time is precious. I do not mean that in the precursor-to-mortality obsessive way that plagues modern middle-aged people, but as realization that I will never be able to read all the books that I want to read. And books are not a metaphor. I have books in my apartment I haven’t opened yet. Add to that the number of books published each year—forever piling atop those that already exist—and the number of things I want to read but never will is a data-point better left unplotted.
Time is the culprit in my prior avoidance of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I’ve heard universal praise from everyone (most importantly from my sister who functions as my sci-fi/fantasy sensei). The library doesn’t have a lot of copies, though, and this book isn’t new enough to be thrust into my face when I browse at bookstores. So I didn’t feel compelled to stake a strong claim in the borrowers’ queue.
Once I was able to check it out, I didn’t feel a pressing need to maximize my borrowing time. I had just wrapped the Shades of Magic trilogy and was a bit lukewarm on it. I can almost excuse my trepidation in starting a new genre fantasy trilogy. Other excuses include, but are not limited to: I was in the mood for non-fiction; I wasn’t ready for new characters; I was afraid it had been overhyped; I was afraid I had burned out on kingdoms, hundred-thousand or regular-type.
can’t spell “regular-type” without “teen girl squad!”
I had a million different reasons that I wouldn’t give Kingdoms a fair shake. Eventually—after a little prompting from the panel of colleagues I polled—I decided to just go for it.
And, baby, am I ever glad I did. I’m sure you’ve rolled your eyes at someone saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” before, but clichéd or not it feels built for this book. It pains me to leave a review without block quotes, but I shall forsake them for this review, as all the parts should be read in situ.
Unsurprisingly, I jumped on the library loan queue for the sequel somewhere around the halfway point of this book, and am eleventh on the list—for one copy—which is vaguely criminal.
See you for the next review in about six months.