Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There's a lot of hype about this book, coming even from people whose opinions I respect, so when I found a cheap copy I snatched it up. The back cover copy suggests political intrigue, fascinating worldbuilding, a good romance. The book offers none of these things. The worldbuilding is, in brief places, quite interesting. I drank up little details about Yeine's culture, matrilineal and female-dominant, yet more complex than the "man-eating bitches" variant I've seen elsewhere. Do we get a full exploration of this society? Sadly not. Is Yeine a complicated product of it, struggling with her mixed heritage and, now, the transition from leader of her tribe to the token barbarian girl in a patrilineal white society? No. As with the other hints - distant lands, the division between Naha and Nahadoth - we are given too little, in favour of Sky and the relationships within it. I suspect we are meant to find Sky boring - it's entirely white and smooth and sterile - but intention hardly distracts from how terribly, terribly boring it is to read about Sky. Surely it could have merited a few pretty lines of description, but Jemisin's prose is bare and simple. Description seems low on the book's priorities. (One glimmer is the old temple with two boarded-up windows - a great detail - but soon we're back to white, plain Sky. The good bits are only glimmers.) If Sky is intentionally bland, the characterisation and plot should compensate, yes? Sadly not. The plot focuses on relationships more than political scheming; when it switches to the latter, it's a politics without the layers and difficult-to-penetrate intentions of a book that pitches itself as being about politics. In some places, the politics seems a distraction before we get back to the important business of Yeine talking to gods and fretting a bit. I did like the chapter called "Diamonds" (all the chapters are named as straightforwardly and pointlessly as this, as if numbers alone are too naked); I can believe in Yeine's need to take a blunt approach in her limited time scale, and the method is fun to read. Little else impressed me. A relationship-focused story requires great characters to succeed. This story offers little. I adored Sieh, a layered and pleasant-to-read character, and found Nahadoth sometimes interesting - especially the underexplored Naha/Nahadoth aspect of him. Sometimes he reminded me too much of the melodramatic hero in manga or fanfiction. - SPOILERS - In fact, a lot of the relationship between Yeine and Nahadoth reminded me of fanfiction, which is not a slight on the entire genre; rather, I thought of the overwrought and silly relationships depicted in some stories, with kisses at unexpected moments, proclamations of lost tenderness, assurances that it is not lost, no, merely hidden in the terrible present, and a truly ridiculous sex scene. (They fly through the universe and see whales with the faces of long-lost friends.) - END SPOILERS - Yeine herself had so much potential. The young leader of her tribe, uprooted to a distant and deeply different seat of power, where she is quickly expected to know enough to survive. And there are glimpses of her background affecting the present: the world's equivalent of coloured contact lenses freaks her out, she's blunter than her Arameri relations, she makes an effort to research various things. Yet never did I believe in her ability to lead a tribe, to act with more than her bluntness, to plan in the long-term, to participate in any kind of culture - because she, like Sky, is so bland. Certainly she lacks agency for much of the novel, through no fault of her own, but in her frustration and confusion and attempts to act I got no good glimpse of the woman she is said to be. She finds the cold-hearted culture incomprehensible, but little else of the Arameri surprises her; perhaps her Arameri mother prepared her for its differences, but fundamental things like the role of men and women never seem to trouble her. Never even draw a remark. There's one moment when she's condescending towards men. One, that I recall, in 398 pages narrated by a woman from a female-dominated society. Even if her mother schooled her into a more equal-handed attitude - though I wonder what her tribe would have thought - it didn't ring true. Other characters, besides Sieh, impressed me just as little. I'd have liked more of Relad, her male cousin, but he's sidelined in favour of evil Scimina. The author admits to intentionally writing Scimina as two-dimensional "Just Because" a fantasy story needs a big Evil and if Scimina had been otherwise, Yeine might have sympathised with her and found it difficult to act against her. (I am not lying: [...]) This refusal to give Yeine a moral quandary is indicative of how little Yeine pays for the entire core plot. Her god-friends are tortured but heal immediately, and at least externally brush off the psychological wounds. She is taken from her homeland but, as with much else of Yeine's character, I didn't actually feel convinced by her moments of homesickness. By the end, she has gained a lot, yet she's not especially struggled. If she'd sat on her hands for two weeks, the ending in Sky would essentially have been the same (though the side-plot of her homeland's military situation would probably have turned out worse for them). Dekarta, T'vril and Viraine never excited me, nor did the other trapped gods - none of whom, besides Sieh, read believably like gods. Everything about this book had such potential. By the end, I thought forlornly of it written differently, with a denser plot and complicated characters, and wish I'd read that book instead. This one just disappoints with its all-round blandness.