The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

This is a fast and furious tale of Yeinne the strong young matriarch of an impoverished backwater kingdom. She is only innocent in comparasion to the amoral debauchery of her maternal relations, the Arameri, who might as well be the Cabots in the old poem on Boston. She is called to Sky, seat of her powerful relations, where she is shocked to be named a candidate to become head the family. Of course, she never doubts her true role is intemded to serve in some fashoin as a disposable tool which no one powerful will mourn. Her goal quickly becomes to die in the way that will bring the best advantage her paternal homeland, vengeance for her mother's murder, and without giving up all of her own sense of integrity. The characterizations are strong and entralliing, especially those of the gods. Fantasy is too often bereft of pragmitists, and while the antagonists flat and predictable, the protagnists were quite unusual for the stock material making the whole story more interesting than it should have been. I really enjoyed this narrative style matched with pace of the plot, usually the "if I only knew then, what I knew now" autobiographical narrator struggles hold up evenly in a novel. That this story covers only a few weeks of time and that the author was miserly with digressions made it work really well. Plot is rather weak, but the fast pace and cynicism of the characters disguises this rather well. The story ends up seeming fresh more because none of the innocent options of such a stock situation are even seriously considered much less explored at length. This story desperately needed a prolouge showing Yeinne leading her people. There is too much stock expectation of what a provincial girl will be that interferes with the reader's attachment to Yeinne early on. Unenthusiatic wedding preparations being called off by the summons would have been a nice prologue, as it hard buy into the idea of a single matriarch being left without comment. The most unsatisfactory part of book was never truly understanding Kinneth's character after so much time spent exploring her memory. More understanding or less discussion of Kinneth would have made this a much better book. I was left suspecting she was never a whole person in the author's mind.