I was prepared to tell myself and others that this second book in the Inheritance Trilogy was another “potential masterwork that needed a bit of trimming here and there” (much like the first novel) but Jemisin knocked it out of the park, and, by time you get to those last few pages, you know you’ve read something special. TBK puts on a speculative fiction and writing with *style* clinic that totally devastates on emotional and aesthetic levels: Jemisin really opens up the world here and manages to raise stakes while keeping the focus entirely on the more human aspects of the story. This book is a pleasure to read, teeming with magic and sexuality and love and the urban and the nuances of loneliness and pain, and I highly recommend it to even anyone who hasn’t read the first book in this trilogy.