How dare you successfully sell me the Kencyrath series! I read the first 2 books last week, and it’s killing me to not be able to read book 3 while at work. It’s such an interesting series! I’m really enjoying how the world building is slowly given to us, rather than have it thrown in all at the beginning, which gives me many Questions, and keeps me reaching for the next book.
Welcome to literally one of the smallest fandoms I’ve ever been a part of, I’m so sorry. But not like. THAT sorry.
And yes! I love the way the worldbuilding is introduced gradually, first because it preserves the books from feeling unapproachably dense with exposition (which I, a simple ADHD fool, appreciate), but also because it means that reading the books for the first time gives the reader such a high level of connection with Jame.
The entire opening conceit is “this is Jame, she is largely amnesiac and only barely aware of what’s going on around her, and it will stay that way until she’s told otherwise.” So what exposition there is, at first, is just the things that Jame remembers learning as a child, which means it’s pretty simplistic! Not necessarily wrong, just...clean and simple and blunt in a way that rapidly unravels. And then the reader learns stuff right along with Jame by way of other characters telling her--like the fate of Ganth Grey Lord, or the way that Kendar are treated by Highborn, or, like, the existence of Torisen Black Lord. Jame doesn’t know those things! She has to get told in misshapen chunks to be pieced together, or else learn by seeing and doing and fucking up!
Which means that getting slam dunked into Tori’s chapters in the second book is this sudden splash of cold water from a bucket labeled “Person Who Actually Knows Some Stuff For Pretty Darn Sure.” It may not be the same stuff Jame knows! Torisen, for example, has probably never thought overmuch about what the implications of the Three Faced God as compared to other polytheistic deities might be, at that point. On the other hand, Jame is barely familiar with the political structure of her own society, does not know anything about the Southern Host except that it’s presumably pretty large, based on what Marc told her, and cannot be trusted not to go plunging into the first extradimensional portal that hoves into her field of vision.
I’m not saying that one of these flavors of knowledge is fundamentally more useful than the other, but I AM saying that I’m sure it’s very nice for Tori to be The Person Who Knows Some Stuff, on a meta level. It doesn’t last, but I’m sure it was nice for him.
Anyway, it’s a really delightful way to address worldbuilding in a fantasy series, and Seeker’s Mask is a great way to continue it within the Kencyrath without things feeling dull or stale. I’m so delighted that you’ve caved to my incessant heckling of the Internet at large, please join me in my canoe and have some lemonade.
