Every now and then, something special brings a new flavor, a blending of colors, an amazing moment, that just leaves me saying 'wow.' Jemisin did that for me in The Killing Moon. An unusual story line, an interesting fantasy world, multi-culti characters, and theological sophistication while being oh-so-readable made for an engrossing, delicious read. I sat down today and read until it was finished, breaking only for dinner and to follow the sun as it shifted around the yard.

The story takes plac More...

The Killing Moon is the first in a new epic fantasy series by the author of the The Inheritance Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin. Jemisin has said that The Killing Moon is her "homage to epic fantasy — as opposed to the Inheritance Trilogy, which was more my eyeroll at epic fantasy". This book hit me hard and stole me away from reality, completely. I was not expecting it. I had read great things about the Inheritance Trilogy, which I really need to read (I now fully understand that I really need to read i More...

Wow... That was amazing. This is a fantastic book. 2012 continues to prove a fertile year for fantasy with the first in a new series by NK Jemisin. So far, it appears that there will only be two books, this volume and the next, titled The Shadowed Sun, which I'll be acquiring as soon as it comes out, which is thankfully on a payday for me.

Overall, I enjoyed this book more than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The growth in her writing is extremely evident. Her distinct authorial voice is still th More...

Beautiful, complex, and refreshingly original, The Killing Moon shines bright!

Ehiru-the dreamer- Ehiru is a Gatherer in the city-state of Gujaareh. He has devoted his life to serving the goddess Hananja. Upon taking a commission, he enters a person's dreams and gathers the dreamer's soul so that they will live in peace forever, even though their body dies in the process. Ehiru has never questioned his faith...until now! After a Gathering goes horribly wrong, Ehiru begins to doubt his own magical More...

I'm really struggling with my rating here. I loved this book. Absolutely and completely. The whole time I was reading it I had that magical feeling going when we read a new favorite book, one of many and many, for the first time. But my conscious is questioning whether it deserves a full five score. For now I'm saying yes. But for any objectiveness you can bring it down to four and a half if you wish.

...Where to start? I'm definitely not going to try to explain the plot. But let's just say for w More...

Cross-posted on Readerling

From the author's note:

Like most fantasy writers, I have found it challenging to write material influenced by real (if bygone) cultures. [...] Since this is a fantasy novel, not a historical text, I found myself in the odd position of having to de-historify these tales as much as possible -- in effect stripping away the substance of reality while leaving behind only the thinnest broth for flavoring. My goal was to give homage; my goal was not to ape humanity. Armchair E

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One of the things I say frequently is, "this was an interesting book". Well, this was an interesting book. The world according to the author has multiple influences...though it springs largely from ancient Egypt. There are influences from all over however and if you care to look you can see them.

Actually however I'd suggest you just relax and enjoy the book. This is an exercise in detailed and skilled world building. Ms. Jemisin had to build the world, lay out the "magic system" and then build t More...

As is so often the case with great novels, the opening chapter of N.K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon offers a snapshot of the conflicts and relationships that end up driving the whole story. We meet the Gatherer Ehiru as he stealthily travels through the city-state Gujaareh at night, collecting tithes of “dreamblood” for the goddess Hananja from its dying or corrupt inhabitants. This dreamblood will then be used by his order’s Sharers to heal and help others. Ehiru’s first commission is an old man More...

This is my first encounter with N.K. Jemisin. I planned to read The Inheritance Trilogy for some time now, but I accidentally stumbled upon this book and thought 'Why not?'

The start was rough. Unknown terminology, world, customs... And each chapter sported a different protagonist. It took a lot of concentration and some patience until I understood it. But eventually the book got its claws in me, and I was reading chapter after chapter eager to see what happens next.

It's hard commenting on the ch More...

NK Jemisin's best yet. Halfway through the story I worried resolution would be deferred to the next book, which will be released shortly, but the author slammed the end of the story down like a card player laying a flush of spades. I would love to see more fantasy like this, featuring an end at the end, a rich setting at the beginning, and a magic awash with moral uncertainty.

This book revolves around moral dilemma. Dreamblood seems to be the energy released when a soul is shoved/escorted to the More...

Imagine a society very much like ancient Egypt, but clearly not on our Earth as their planet (strictly a moon) orbits a gas giant. Now imagine that this society has learned how to harness the power of Jung's "collective unconscious", collecting the power of dreams and even a person's entire "life force" to cure disease and injury.

This is Gujaareh. The Goddess Hananja's Gatherers go out into the night and gather the Dreamblood and Dreambile of those judged corrupt by the Hetawa - Gujaareh's relig More...

While I've been hearing about the Inheritance Trilogy for years, I hadn't heard very much about the Dreamblood, which only came out last year. This was my introduction to N.K. Jemisin, and I am absolutely seeking out more of her work.

The Killing Moon is somewhat impenetrable at first because Jemisin drops you in her world without much exposition at all—it wasn't until I finished the book that I saw that there was a HELPFUL GLOSSARY IN THE BACK—so there are heaps of unfamiliar words and concepts More...

“There is power in dreams,” She told him. “Harness it and therein lies magic. But only virtuous men may wield it.”

In The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin creates a wonderful world (similar to ancient Egypt, but Jemisin writes that she was influenced by a lot of cultures - the Gatherers reminded me of ninjas, for example) with priests, reapers, healers - an organized religion, a society where gender equality takes a whole new meaning, and a world of intrigue and politics where you just can't pick a si More...

Even though it is the first in a duology, there is a satisfactory resolution and ending. Important loose ends are tied up and even if you don't read the remaining book, you will be satisfied. I enjoy that aspect!

What I really enjoyed, though, was the fact that the majority of this world is black or brown. Yes, there are lighter colored folks in this world - but they are not the main focus. Even the hairstyles have dreadlocks! I think that is beyond awesome.

I would not really want to live in this More...

I am almost too in awe of how completely amazing this book is to write a proper review. The world creation and the mythology of this universe is completely original while at the same time paying homage to Earth's ancient religions and mythologies. The characters are fully realized and very human; no one is completely good or completely bad and even the characters who do evil things have understandable motivations.
It takes place on a different planet, in a country that slightly resembles ancien More...

This book was a really slow start but got much better. At first, I kept getting lost in the odd names, very different cultures and unstated premise of Jemisin's world. But about halfway through, I started to get interested and, for the last third, I couldn't put it down. The characters...their greed, fear, weaknesses, kindnesses, and determination to do the right thing...were compelling. The world was complex and interesting. This country is based on worship of a moon goddess; Gatherers (kind of More...

This book hit all the right notes for me, and yet I still felt like something was missing. I loved the world Jemisin imagined for this. It is so complex and layered, it felt like a real, living society. I loved the characters. They are all awesome in their own ways, and complex, and I felt like I knew them. I loved the magic. Without giving anything away, the book slowly reveals the nature of the dream magic and its implications.

Even though it checked all of these boxes for me (good characters, More...

First, assuming you’ve read NK Jemisin’s first trilogy, the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy . . . let me say that this duology really doesn’t have the same feel. Instead of the very close first-person narrative, here we have a much more scattered third-person narrative. In THE KILLING MOON, we have three main pov protagonists: the Gatherer Ehiru, with whom we start and who felt to me like the primary protagonist until quite far into the book; Nijiri, his apprentice, who grows up the hard way d More...

With 80 pages to go this was still a five-star book. Great world-building, a variety of characters, a plausible framework of magic and politics, some good guys who turn out not to be, and an excellent sequence of one-choice-leads-to-another for the lead characters. And like the Inheritance series, the text just flows along effortlessly.

Then the Prince started to amp it up. I am still trying to recall which book I read recently with a dragon and a very evil Prince-type character, all bwah-hah-ha More...

Imagine a world where priests can harness the power of dreams.

In Jamison’s fantasy world, characters struggle for redemption in a society pockmarked with corruption. Gujaareh is a magic city, where the priests of Hananja tap into the power of dreams. The Gatherers assist the dying to enter the dream world. Sharers use their power to heal. The novel starts with a breakdown in this system. Gatherer Ehiru falters and loses a soul about to enter eternity. Shaken, he is comforted when his apprentice More...

I will confess: I was a tad confused at first, trying to sort out the jargon. There were a few times when I wondered if I hadn't picked up a sequel by mistake. It would have helped had I found the appendix - the edition of this that I was reading had a strange marking of the last few pages, and when I flipped to this, I found an "interview" with the author. I dislike inadvertently reading the end of a book before I get there, and so made the mistake of assuming there was no glossary (hint: I was More...

The city-state of Gujaareh has a thriving economy of dream-magic. Specially-trained priests gather one sort of energy from nightmares, another sort from sex dreams, another sort from the dreams of the dying; these are then distributed through the city to keep the populace healthy, sane, prosperous.

Or, from the point of view of foreigners: Gujaareh is a city where these seriously damn scary ninjas sneak in through your window while you're asleep and *kill you* by *sucking your soul out*. You will More...

I have two words for you: Ninja. Priests.

There you go, that should really be enough for you to go out and buy this book. I suppose if you need more, though, there is a whole "plot" and "world" and "characters" and stuff. But even Jemisin says that the initial idea that got her started writing was ninja priests, and everything else just kind of built up from there.

Welcome, then, to the great land of Gujaareh, a land not entirely unlike our own ancient Egypt. It rests alongside a great river that More...

C2012:FWFTB: Gujaareh, Gatherers, dream, harvest, magic. Ms Jemisin appears around the book blogging sites as an author of note. Sadly, my normal book source did not stock the first books for some time so before I knew it I had reserved this one thinking that it was the first of her books.
It can be read alone but I did feel, for the first third of the story, that I was missing some background and I had to keep going to the front pages to reassure myself that this was indeed the first of a new se More...

First five-star book of the year and it's about damn time. Plot-wise, the book's not entirely riveting. But Gujaareh, the city in which it's set, is like nothing you've encountered before in fantasy. It combines ancient Egypt, Fruedian dream theory, and Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, which, in addition to being fucking brilliant is also fucking complicated. The genius, then, is how Jemisin peels back the layers of this creepy-dreamy world for the reader at exactly the right pace, and More...

I won a copy of this in Twitter, and was really glad I did! I had read Book 1 of the Inheritance Trilogy by the same author, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which is one of those books that wasn't bad, but just was clearly not my style. (Worth a read, though, and is up for a Nebula Award.)

The things I liked about The Inheritance Trilogy are even stronger in The Killing Moon, and I think we can start assuming these are just Jemisin's strengths - the world building is the best part. She has crafted More...

In the city of Gujaareh, a sect of warrior priests keep the Peace. These Gatherers are bound by no temporal law, guided only by their precept to root out corruption, and lead the souls of the suffering to the afterlife, Ina-Karekh. They do this more or less by sneaking into peoples' bedrooms and killing them while they sleep. And they're the good guys. One of the pleasant surprises in Jemisin's new novel is how totally plausible this seems.

The main protagonists, the incorruptible Gatherer Ehiru More...

I'm going back and forth as to whether I like the book more than the three star review I'm giving it. Largely I think it's because I'm internally comparing it to the Inheritance Trilogy, her first trilogy completed last year, which should be considered one of the best fantasy series of the last couple of decades. Its an unfair comparison, but I think it showcases some of the lows and highs of the Killing Moon.

The highs:

- Jemisin's writing style is as strong as ever. The narrative flows and there More...

Jemisin can build mythology like nobody's business. I love that she doesn't just do the clean types of gods, she creates the weird twisty old gods, the ones with deep roots in nature and the sweaty, amoral genesis stories. Seriously, this must be how religions are created - people like Jemisin developing a creation myth so delicious, you WANT to believe it.

(Also, Jemisin is one of the only authors who can write "loindrapes" into a book and I'll go with it. Anyone else tries that, and I scoff. Sh More...

In a city where the soul is both a traveler and a commodity, death has a different meaning.

Each night, the Gatherers go out. They visit the dying, the incurable, the aged, the insane, the corrupt. The souls they gather are nestled into a good place in the dreaming world forever. The dreamblood they gather is returned to the temple for the healing of others. Children with the dreaming gift who do not join the priesthood go mad.

In principle, this is very idyllic. No one drowns in their own lungs: More...