book review: The Killing Moon

[psocoptera]

The Killing Moon is the first half of a new duology by N. K. Jemisin, author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy. I'm not quite so giddy over it as I was about those, but it's still quite good (and much less romance-novel-y, for those who disliked that). I often seem to enjoy fantasy about priests and devoutly religious characters (the first Kushiel trilogy, the Chalion books, Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow), maybe because that's so foreign to me personally, it's a chance to encounter the alien. In The Killing Moon we get chapters from inside the priestly POV and also outside which makes for some interesting contrasts. Some aspects of the plot are a bit predictable, but there are some nice turns in getting there, and it's compulsively readable. Recommended to fantasy readers!

There's a short story online here set in more or less the same world (I think she developed it a little more for the novels) - if you like this story, you'll probably enjoy the book, if you don't, you probably won't.