Loftwings and Demons

While I've always read both sci-fi and fantasy, I feel I leaned more towards fantasy when I was younger and more towards sci-fi now. I don't think either genre is  more literary (nor has that ever been a reason that I read either genre), but when I was a kid I leaned more towards the fantasy aesthetic whereas now it seems I enjoy the scifi one more.

I've branched out to other genres more as an adult, but these are still the ones I read most often. The most essential thing a novel must do is hold my attention. How? Well, that is the mystery of my mind. But it does tend to help if they are fast-paced, have a lot of action, or character development. I also enjoy a well-executed plot, and as might be surmised by my genre preferences, detailed worldbuilding.

I finished The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin (the 3rd book in her Inheritance trilogy) on the last day of 2020.  

What an epic story.  As the name implies, this story has a lot of focus on the gods in her fantasy series, though she also weaves a story of complicated political intrigue between mortals here.

Though this is very firmly an epic fantasy, it has moments that have a very...sci-fi flavor to me, which is something I appreciate as someone who's both an avid sci-fi and fantasy fan.    

I really appreciate that even the most threatening character in the story who does the most harm does not act only out of evil and cruelty, and none of the protagonists are made out to be purely good or benevolent characters.  

While I would absolutely recommend these stories, I'd also caution that there's a lot of potentially triggering and upsetting content in them, as they don't shy away from unpleasantness or moral complexity, so I would keep that in mind.  A lot of things that I might find upsetting in other stories didn't bother me so much in this one, but that doesn't mean someone else would feel the same since how and when and why people are upset by certain things can be very dependent on the specifics of not only how the material is handled in a work, but on their own individual experiences in life.  

Anyway, I also learned after I finished that story that there were more stories set in the same universe, so now I'm going to go looking for those!