I was also amazed that Jemsin was writing action-adventure-fantasy, which requires so much world-building, without having access to telling us what stuff looked like. Oree’s world creating itself out of the dark, in lines of flame or color, is a beautiful prolonged effect that thrilled me throughout the book. I saw some of those rivulets move impossibly upward, igniting the filaments of his hair, the stern-carved lines of his face.” Dewdrops of glimmering silver beaded along his flesh and then ran down in rivulets, illuminating the texture of skin in smooth relief. “At first I saw only delicate lines of gold limn the shape of a man. Here is how the blind woman, Oree Shoth, describes a man she finds in her muckbin, whose identity and relationship to her will form the spine of the plot:

(There will be some spoilers about the first book, but I’m trying to keep them to a minimum, since Jemisin’s twisty and elaborate plotting is one of her strengths.) The action starts around ten years after the first book ended, and concerns some of the same gods from the first book, with different emphasis. She’s an artist on the streets of Shadow, which is what the City of Sky from the first book has been renamed. In The Broken Kingdoms, the narrator-this is a spoiler, but a tiny one-is blind, and can see only magic. (I’ve also now read book three in the Inheritance Trilogy, so am officially a superfan…). Jemisin’s first novel was positive, but I didn’t know I’d buy and read the sequel the very next night, in a blur of delight.

The broken kingdoms