A review by bookslikegranola
The Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons

3.75

Kihrin flees the Capital City with a god killing sword to the horse obsessed province of Jorat. He immediately runs into Janel, the mysterious dream woman from book one, and sits to hear her story about why he needs to help her slay a dragon. Overall, the new characters are fun, but I will say that I missed the gritty feel of Capital City and the high stakes of the politics/assassin cult. I also ultimately liked the exploration of gender, where social roll determines gender in Jorat (as opposed to physical sex characteristics), but it felt a little stilted at the beginning. When it is reveal Janel views herself as a Stallion (a “ruler” and thus a Joratese man), Kihrin immediately offers to change the pronouns he refers to Janel with, but she refuses saying that the people of Jorat don’t care about pronouns outside of their language. So it initially felt like very token trans rep to me, but as the story continues, it felt a lot more fleshed out as social position as gender expression rather than a direct trans representation, which I did enjoy. It did strain credulity a bit for me that most of the empire is very sexist and homophobic but this one province has super different gender and sexual norms and no one is bothered (I think more explanation of how isolated Jorat is would have helped. 

 

Recommended if you liked the first book. If you feel like this book is a bit of a slow down from the first, don’t worry, it really starts to pick back up with the rest of the series.