Even in her weakest books, N. J. Jemisin creates the kind of detailed, sprawling, fully realized worlds that would make C. S. Lewis weep. At the end of The Shadowed Sun is a six page glossary of terms invented for this world she has brought to life, and the book has the worldbuilding to support it. Very few authors can create whole-cloth the way Jemisin can. I wish I could live in this woman’s imagination. The Shadowed Sun in book two in the Dreamblood series, following The Killing Moon. Her worldbuilding is so dense it creates almost a barrier to entry (I’ll admit […]

In my reviews of book one and book two, I was pretty forthcoming with my disappointment – they were better than most, but fell far short of the greatness I knew was coming later in her career. Y’all were sweet and let me know that if I didn’t like these, I should really call the whole thing off, but for reasons that escape me I ploughed on through. And hey, I’m not totally sad I did. Maybe it’s because I don’t remember the first two all that well, but I think this might have been my favorite. It was definitely […]

While reading The Inheritance trilogy, I keep having to remind myself of how much I adore the author and man, the second one – The Broken Kingdoms – does not make that easy. There’s just something really jarring about exploring this new fantasy world and then suddenly your narrator bemoans getting “dumped” by her ex-boyfriend. But I’ve read her later books and I know how freakishly talented she is. Reading these is watching her get there, and it’s a nice reminder that people don’t just fall out of the ether that way. If you’re like me and you’d forgotten where we left off, […]