Jemisin has a very interesting take on world building with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, it isn't necessarily character driven world building, but environment, and historical world building. The setup uses an idea that has already been developed, and as time passes we learn more about the world itself. At the start of the story a cosmic force already exists in this world, discussing old gods and how they each had specific role in creating the world. The story is fairly typical having a characters parents die, and the reader and hero knowing little about them, thus making them want to dive deeper into why they were murdered. However I don't necessarily root for the hero, or have any motivation to see them overcome an obstacle, because we and the protagonist knew so little about the parents, that we can't relate or feel any emotion to them passing.
The world itself is a similar feel to greek mythology for us. Gods can take on human form, and cause my chief with mortals. The only difference is that some mortals have control over some of the gods, and others do not. Which makes the tier of power in the world very questionable and a little confusing.
Overall its a very interestingly built world, but it has so many similarities with other works of fiction, that are very identifiable, I personally feel this subtracts from the book. It attempts to be unpredictable with the events that occur, but the events that are labeled as unpredictable are very predictable because of the world and events that are presented to us.
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