**30 Books in 30 Days**
Book 2/30
I pre-ordered this and it downloaded on release day. In July 2015. I did this little collection a disservice by waiting six years to read it. I really had to do some Google-fu to refresh my memory on the events and the characters in the series. In the end, I still think I would have given it three stars, maybe 3.5, but it wouldn’t have been so much frickin’ work. (The Awakened Kingdom, the novella Jemisin released as an addendum to this series, gave me a lot more satisfaction than these stories did. It’s a truly a delightful little book.)
The first story is the best one, I think. It’s a prequel to book one, and follows Nahadoth in the early days of his imprisonment by the Arameri, and how he became the character we meet in that book. I love Nahadoth as a character so I was probably always going to like this one the best, but I do think it does the best job of having a concrete story to tell that is interesting. 3.5/5 stars
The second story is about the shell Nahadoth spent 2,000 years inhabiting, but who is now his own person (godling) called Hado/Ahad. This was my least favorite by far. Some of that was that I really did not remember the nitty gritty details of book two, but mostly I just really didn’t care about Hado at all and wasn’t interested in what he was up to. 2/5 stars
The last story follows Glee (the daughter of Itempas and Oree Shoth) as she looks for her father and builds a relationship with him. I very much enjoyed this one because I love both characters, but it really didn’t have all that much oomph for me as a story. (Again, this may have been different had book two been fresh in my mind.) 3/5 stars
Feels nice to get this one off my TBR! But as Jemisin is one of my favorite authors, I don’t anticipate waiting this long to “finish” a series written by her again.
