What did I expect from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? Honestly, I can’t tell. When I saw the translation of book two in a German bookstore some weeks ago, I simply was drawn in by the blurb on the back of the book. It sounded like a stand-alone – or at least like the first book in a trilogy – so when I went looking for the English version, I was surprised to find out that it was in fact not. Now, the summary of book one didn’t sound as intriguing to me at all, but I figured I would maybe not be More...

a pleasingly old-fashioned fantasy - and by old-fashioned, i mean the opposite of the dense, complicated, multiple perspective, incredibly epic mega-fantasies that have had the most popularity over the past couple decades. this is something different. the language is straightforward, for the most part, and certainly beautiful at times. although the mystery is a complicated one, and deals with rather large issues such as the making and unmaking of an entire world, it still feels somehow 'miniatur More...

N.K. Jemisin approaches empire in her epic fantasy debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Laura Resnick ( In Legend Born ) conceived of conquered Silerians, but few authors discuss the national, political and local effects of imperialism, fearing bored readers and infodumps. Jemisin's subtlety indicates a social awareness, an appreciation for PR vs. reality, biased histories, and mistrust of power.

"Once, like High North, Senm was also a land of barbarians, and the Amn were simply the most successf

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http://kitabisevda.blogspot.com/2012/...

Çok güzel bi kitaptı, en kısa zamanda yorumum geliyor. Tabii önce bu hışınla ikinci kitabı okumalıyım. Ayş çıldıracağım. Çok güzeldi.

Edit: 19.09.2012


Kitaba dün gece başlamıştım ve bu sabah bitti. O kadar akıcı, güzel ve eğlenceli ki.

Yüz Bin Krallığa bayıldım! Neden mi?

* Tanrılar: Düşmüşte olsa tanrı tanrıdır. Hem Yeine sürekli onlarla konuşuyor, her konuştuğunda çıldıracak gibi oluyorum. Üstelik tanrılar öyle güçlerini kullanmaktna çekinen cinsten değil, k More...

I flew through this book, faster than I thought I would. Perhaps it was the font size and white spacing; perhaps it was the compelling story. Told in the first person by a backwoods 'barbaric' young woman called to the very center of the world, unbelievably as the heir, by her grandfather. Completely out of her element, but not without heart, courage and brains, Yeine proves equal to the challenges of brutal court politics.

I can't say I enjoyed this story, but I can appreciate the ingenuity of More...

I think I may have read too much fantasy.

I'm always apprehensive when I read a book everyone loved and can't get worked up about it. I was expecting this book to be radical and innovative and unusual. It wasn't.

You've read this before.
You're too harsh.
This writing style-

**********

Makes no narrative sense.

Seriously, what is it about this book I'm missing? What makes it worthy of being a Hugo and Nebula nominee? The choppy writing style felt weird to me- not because I didn't understand the tran More...

i found the many bits and pieces of the story intriguing, so no surprise there that it was so many things at once: unsettling, beautiful, dark, gripping, weird, magical & creepy. written in a beautifully refreshing narrative style which emphasized the story (and ultimately its narrator as well), --sometimes easy, often difficult for me to follow--, it is about a girl trying to find a place in the world... in a story centered on (fallen) nobles & all the other people serving those nobles More...

Dreamy prose and an even dreamier plot.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms refers to the collective world, governed by the god-favored Arameri clan. After the death of the exiled Arameri heir, the head of the Arameri clan names his granddaughter Yeine heir to the entire Hundred Thousand Kingdoms...along with two other Arameri contestants. When Yeine enters Sky, the Arameri castle suspended in the air by an impossibly thin column of rock, she must pit herself against her two deadly competitors while a More...

I am an avid reader of urban fantasy and rarely do I engage in the high fantasy but I am so pleased that I went out a limb to read this book. If you are seeking an epic battle with travels to an exotic land with political drama then I think this book might just be for you.

In short Yeine has just buried her mother and she is summoned by the king, who is also her grandfather to the Sky city. When Yeine is summoned she has no idea why and is really surprised when it turns out that she is to be nam More...

I liked this pretty much exactly as much as I expected. I loved the writing style, poetic without being overburdened, the cultural descriptions, the cosmology, and some of the secondary characters. Sieh, in particular, stole the show for me. Neither Yeine nor Nahadoth did much for me, alas, and the politics never came across as subtle as I think they were supposed to be. But both were well-worth dealing with to have a chance to explore Jemisin's world.

As a non-linear reader (yes, I tend to read More...

I read this book using synthetic speech -- Nuance’s Samantha voice (.wav sample file). Not my favorite aural modality – Neospeech’s synthetic* line of voices such as Kate (another .wav) are examples of much better synthetic speech output. There’s also human-voiced audio, of course, and I actually see now that the U.S. National Library Service is considering recording this book (your tax dollars at work, Americans!). But the NLS runs about eighteen months behind on everything, there’s no commerci More...

N.K. Jemisin's debut fantasy novel is...well, it's something completely different. I've only been this absorbed in, disturbed by and utterly delighted with a book a very few times in my life - I read it in one day and two days later my head is still buzzing with it. And I don't think a single person that I've emailed or spoken to in the past two days has escaped without hearing me rave about and recommend this story.

THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS is an exquisitely written fantasy which harks back More...

I really enjoyed this fantasy - I found it quiet, intricate, and gleaming, shiny, in a way. Maybe that's the worldbuilding. The image of place is so innovative and strong.

This is a classic underdog tale, really, of a heroine thrown into a battle she can't win, and her underdog allies, who happen to be enslaved gods. The slow reveal of all aspects of this and the evolution of their alliance was one of the extreme pleasures of this book.

There are also a few quirky narrative gambits I enjoyed, li More...

I thought this was a pretty great fantasy book.

The voice of the protagonist is its greatest strength - you don't feel like you're reading a book, you feel like you're being told a story. Yeine is slightly unreliable, skipping ahead and then finding her way back, interrupting herself when she remembers something important. I can understand why some readers might find this distracting, but it made her feel real to me.

It's quite different to traditional fantasy, the take on the gods is quite new, More...

This was interesting, so interesting I am not sure how good it really was. I think the 4 stars rating are more me judging the experience of reading this ( wow, fun!) than the book itself - which is flawed.

This book was not exactly what I thought that it was going to be: big thick multi-volume plots with lots of courtly intrigue and cliffangers and huge multicast families. Like of course A Song of Ice and Fire, and tons of things which came before and after. Apart from ASOIAF I am probably burne More...

In the midst of reading the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin several people asked me how I liked it so far. Y’all this book reminds me of why I love fantasy. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has it all: magic, impossible odds, Gods, privilege, power, intrigue, politics. Yeine, still grieving over her mother’s murder is summoned by the ruler of the hundred thousand kingdoms and head of the elite race of people called Arameri, her grandfather Dekarta, to what is known as Sky, a building that More...

This was a commendable first effort, but I cannot bring myself to rate it any higher. In view of all the positive reviews it has been receiving, I just expected more from this story, but, no, it fell completely short of expectations.

The writing itself is certainly readable, but when it comes to portraying emotional turmoils, the author opts for "Tell, Don't Show" too often, so some scenes are filled with rather cringe-worthy descriptions of how a character "feels". The author might have been goi More...

At 3 am this morning a startling thought occurred to me. Even though I was alone in the way that every reader is alone at 3 am in the morning - the house totally dark and silent, my cats curled up tightly (one pressed close against my body, the other sleeping within eyesight but far enough away that my movements don't disturb her) and it occurred to me - how many hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have stayed up until 3 am with this book, unable to put it down? We're like an unseen fraternity, More...

The is an excellent work of fantasy. Ms. Jemisin weaves a creative concept about imprisoned Gods without leaning on readily available prepackaged mythology. Had I based my decision to read this book on most of the confusing reviews I had read, I would have missed a rare offering of pure genius.

This book accomplishes what few fantasy writers achieve, it's easy to follow the story and understand the world around the characters. As a fan of fantasy, I can work with the complexity of Dune or the sim More...

Very original idea. There was a war in Heaven and the fallen gods have ended up under the thumb of a human family beholden to the victor. As a result, they control the politics of the world and often bend it to their cruel will. In many unique and interesting ways, Jemisin explores the relationships between god and man.

My main issue is with the characters. Far too often they can come across as weakly developed and (at worst) cliched. This is a shame because the framework is so strong and origina More...

What sold me on the novel wasn’t the back of the book, or the multitude of good reviews it has received but rather the single opening sentence from Brent Weeks’s (the Night Angel Trilogy, The Black Prism) review of it Goodreads: “What if gods were real…and walked among us…enslaved…and were used as weapons…and were really pissed off about it?” That sounded pretty cool to me. In fact, it reminded a little of Scalzi’s The God Engines; a novella I quite enjoyed.

The plot, at the outset at least, is f More...

Just got the ARCs. Reading for typos and errors, and also for the thrill of READING MY BOOK YAY WHOA.

It was okay. It's a cool world, very anime feeling. But I feel like a lot of the characters were just kind of... empty shells? Like, the book says "This character is like this." and then you never really see the character live up to that description. Nahadoth and Yeine's relationship was really annoying. The book tries to make you think like Nahadoth is this SUPER DANGEROUS GUY but really he just is a mopey wiener. Yeine is way too overly dramatic. I really never understood what her motivations More...

I found this books to be magical! It offered me so much, and yet refused to spoon feed me everything. It required me to fill in the blanks. Let me explain:

The characters were incredible. They felt real. They did something, and the action was explained through the eyes of the characters. Sometimes, she was right in her assumptions. Sometimes, she was wrong. Since it was written in first person, this made sense. I do not WANT the actions of every character explained to me. I have this magical thin More...

Oh my, what a refreshing and original fantasy novel this turned out to be. If you find the book's description somewhat underwhelming, like I did, fear not: this is a compelling and engaging fantasy story, with a unique setting and some crisp plotting and prose.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms takes place in Sky, the world's capital, a city that wields enslaved gods as weapons. This unique relationship between the world's ruling people and their god powers the story throughout, and it's original and More...

When a book receives as much hype as The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has, it can go only one of two ways for me: I either love it to death and can appreciate all the praise it's garnered, or I scratch my head an am left with consumer disillusionment. Unfortunately, in this case it turned out to be the latter.

First off, let's mention the great things about this novel because there are several.

The premise: an outcast warrior princess, suddenly named an heiress to the titular kingdoms, is thrust into More...

For the record, my copy of N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came courtesy of a contest conducted by the writer Tricia Sullivan, whose novel, Maul, I read a few years back and which which has since stayed with me far more strongly than most. I wish I could say the same about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Stormwinds over a cardboard world:
Nebula-nominated first novel is epic failure



I opened N.K. Jemisin's (now Nebula Award nominated) first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, having More...

Honestly, I don't know where to begin with this book.

I did not really enjoy the first portion of this book. It was well-written, beautifully written actually, the backdrop of the world was rich and lush but I felt the atmosphere more than I Felt Yeine. I liked her enough but I didn't care about what happened to her. Through the first portion of the story, anyone could have been the narrator and it wouldn't have affected the story.

Until I hit the halfway mark. Things picked up, Yeine became a lot More...

4.0 to 4.5 stars. I learned something while I was reading this excellent fantasy story by Ms. Jemisin that may seem obvious to most but still has changed my outlook on fantasy stories going forward. You see, I have always been a big fan of interesting world-building, compelling back stories and histories and unique magic systems and fantasy elements. The problem is that as you read more and more fantasy stories you start to recognize variations on all the well trod (and often trampled) ground an More...