The Killing Moon

Book 1 of the Dreamblood Duology

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This author is excellent at creating believable worlds from the mundane to the mythological, including numbering systems, plants, laws, caste systems, wisdom and religion. I appreciate that in the worlds she builds, most people have dark brown skin and wear their hair in ropes - like the author.

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Many, many generations ago, before pictorals and numeratics and hieratics, words were kept where they belong, in mouths. The people who made sure those words passed on were my ancestors. Written words did not kill my lineage’s purpose, though gone are the crowds—and the riches—we once commanded. We retell the stories regardless, because we know: stone is not eternal. Words can be.

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This story centers around a very small, deeply-disciplined group of individuals called Gatherers and how they get caught up in the corruption of the highest levels of their society. It has politics, a love story, war, and very cool ideas about dreams.

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Like the other novels by the same author, this one is fraught with tension. She has a way of imparting dread and fear with just a few sentences. There were parts of this when my heart was pounding, when I couldn’t put the book down.

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Nijiri flinched at her words and their implications—far beyond the petty schemes she imagined. It was as the Teachers, even lecherous Omin, had warned him: those who consort with the corrupt eventually become corrupt themselves. Evil was the most contagious of diseases, so virulent that no herb, surgery, or dream-humor could cure it. One’s sense of what was normal, acceptable, became distorted by proximity to wrongness; entire nations had succumbed this way, first to decadence, then collapse.

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Ms. Jemisin does a great job with endings too. She doesn’t faff about at all. She just takes a paragraph or two and drops the curtain. I appreciate that.

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The only quasi-negative thing I want to say about this novel is that her naming convention is a bit clunky. About 20% of the way in, I had to back to the beginning and start over because it took me that long to make sense of things.

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