Kind of a snarky review, made me wonder if the author ran over your dog or something. (The crack about wood was pretty funny, though.)
I don't think the characterization was as flat as you found it, though I did get kind of tired of Yeine's rather cliched infatuation with bad-boy Nahadoth.
When I first started reading it, I loved it. By the end, the shiny had worn off a little, but I still think it was a good book, though pretty rough in places, like you'd expect from a first novel. The narrative device of having Yeine talking to herself/Enefa in between paragraphs was annoying and overused.
Scimina and Relad were neither of them very interesting. I'm still unsure how I feel about the ending.
I did, however, really like the way the gods were portrayed, because they felt like gods -- super-powerful, wise, ancient, yet also very human and capricious and prone to being stupid as well. When I read Greek myths, I always wondered, "Why would anyone worship these assholes, except out of sheer terror?" And Jemisin's gods were a lot like that: godlike, but not nice or benevolent except in a sort of abstract way.
The author's notes said the Nahadoth/Itempas duality was drawing on Hindu mythology, but I think she was influenced more by Christianity than she realized, or maybe the Milton/Paradise Lost vibe was deliberate.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 05:40 pm (UTC)I don't think the characterization was as flat as you found it, though I did get kind of tired of Yeine's rather cliched infatuation with bad-boy Nahadoth.
When I first started reading it, I loved it. By the end, the shiny had worn off a little, but I still think it was a good book, though pretty rough in places, like you'd expect from a first novel. The narrative device of having Yeine talking to herself/Enefa in between paragraphs was annoying and overused.
Scimina and Relad were neither of them very interesting. I'm still unsure how I feel about the ending.
I did, however, really like the way the gods were portrayed, because they felt like gods -- super-powerful, wise, ancient, yet also very human and capricious and prone to being stupid as well. When I read Greek myths, I always wondered, "Why would anyone worship these assholes, except out of sheer terror?" And Jemisin's gods were a lot like that: godlike, but not nice or benevolent except in a sort of abstract way.
The author's notes said the Nahadoth/Itempas duality was drawing on Hindu mythology, but I think she was influenced more by Christianity than she realized, or maybe the Milton/Paradise Lost vibe was deliberate.