If a book’s main highlight is the weird sex scene which runs over one and a half chapters, it surely says something about the story. Although it is the highlight of the book, I won’t recommend reading the book solely for that reason.
I’m going to list down the positives of this book which are barely handful. Jemisin touches upon the issue of slavery but fails to explore it further. The world and mythos seem interesting enough but aren’t expanded much to the readers’ satisfaction.
The narrative pacing is a bit off. There are smaller sections which occur quite frequently where the author tries either to break the fourth wall or info-dump the same thing again and again. The characters seemed rather two dimensional and not as interesting to get me immersed in the whole story. The prose is quite mediocre but isn’t as off-putting as the amount of the YA-ish storylines the book takes. The romantic pairing is unhealthy and with a lot of issues – I don’t even know how can you start loving a person so suddenly when you stab him while he is trying to throttle a kid. And the sex scene is so ugh.. probably the weirdest one I have encountered so far.
I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t. The first book acts as a standalone, and unless you are interested in reading further you may stop and save your time and effort. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series is said to be far better than this and I might risk reading that series later. I’ll rate this book a 2/5 and perhaps read the further books just because I have the omnibus edition of the series.
Crimson Fantasy Reviews 