The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin

The Killing Moon
N. K. Jemisin
ISBN: 9780316187282
Read May 2, 2014

This book has literally been on my "To Be Read" pile for over a year.  I don't know why I've not been in the mood for it, but I've been really weird about my fantasy reading recently - I'm picking up a lot of old favorites and fluffy reads.  That probably says something deep and psychological about my life, but from my perspective, it was irritating, because I had heard good things about this book, I follow the author on Twitter, and this one seemed to be the book of hers that I would most likely enjoy - but I never got around to picking it up!

Until I did, last week, and it was pretty awesome.

We're on an alternate world in an Egypt-analogue country where magic energy is harvested from dreams and used to fuel everything from magical healing to a type of psychic awareness.  The downside (of course there is a downside) is that the magic dream energy is 1) addictive, and 2) eventually makes the person harvesting it go incurably magically rabid.  Yay!

So, as the genre-savvy people we are, we now know where this story is headed, and how it's going to go.  And for the most part, it does go where it's expected to.  There's a bit of a twist regarding the identity of a character that I probably should have seen coming if I had been paying better attention, and the ending is a bit on the pat side, especially compared to the focus on bureaucracy and petty politicking of the entire storyline.

All that said, I love the characters, I love the idea of the dream energy, I love that the downsides are so insidious and nasty (and totally hidden from the general public) and I love how the Dreaming Moon (the gas giant that this inhabited moon revolves around) looms in the sky.

Critical thoughts:
It was a little slow to get rolling.  There are a lot of characters to cycle through viewpoints, and while I normally like that approach, I was about halfway through the thickness of the book before I really felt like the plot had gotten moving, and I think that the multiplicity of characters and views contributed to that.  Now, that said, I obviously enjoyed the worldbuilding and the characters enough to stick with it for that initial half of the book, even though not much was happening, so there's that.

I felt like we never got a real solid justification for what was driving the Prince along his course of action.  We learn that he's not actually crazed, but his ideas certainly seemed monomaniacal to me.  Coming off of watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier earlier this year, I really felt like he needed more than just a Hydra selling point as his ultimate justification.  I did like that he appeared to genuinely love his wife and children, but again, that personality trait was hard to square with his other actions and treatment of people.  I guess I'm not the best judge of a character who was raised to think the universe revolved around him, but it felt inconsistent to me.

Really happy thoughts:
I really liked how the society had a laid-back approach to sex and relationships.

I loved the Dreaming Moon, and the concept of that magic and the source (the mythology there was especially interesting, and involved complex astronomy and meteorites, which I very much liked.)



All in all, I quite enjoyed it, and I'm glad I (finally) got it read.
There is a companion book set on the same world, The Shadowed Sun, and a projected third one supposedly out this fall, The Fifth Season.