Storyline: 4/5 
 Characters: 3/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 4/5 
 Jemisin was weaving three strands in this longest-of-the-Inheritance volumes. 
 First was the contemporary mythology. The magical system and divine-mortal relationships were carefully crafted in this one, and the worldbuilding was the best of the three books for her rewriting of the rules of Greek lore. I would rather have had the book without the excessive detail on the sexual habits of gods and godlings, but then it probably wouldn't have been a mythology in that case. 
 The second strand that Jemisin braids into this plait is socio-political. I wonder how much of this I would have picked up on had I not read an author interview after the first book. I usually avoid such things for that very reason. Regardless, Jemisin was doing more than telling a story, and here, too, the worldbuilding excels because of it. This is not only a reimagining of mythology but the reimagining of fantasy. I suspect that I'm blind to (or at least not hypersensitive to) many of the biases Jemisin sees in fantasy, and I think that without her interview I would have been oblivious to many of the points she was making. I would have, however, appreciated that the book had a different tenor that was both refreshing and impressive. 
 Romance makes up the the third strand Jemisin handles in this book. It is a romance animated by the other two strands - mythology and politics - so is perhaps more of a novelty for typical readers of that genre. There was very little I enjoyed about this aspect. It simply isn't my genre, and, to be honest, I simply don't want to read homoerotic love scenes regardless of how fantastical of creative. 
 This was on track to be a great book until about the three-quarters mark. There, the romance took too much of the stage. It wasn't simply the description and accounts, but it became about the romance as much as it was about anything else. The other two strands thinned out, halting their previously steady and remarkable progression. The mythology lost its balance between the classic and the contemporary, and order fell prey to the same chaos that permitted the classic Greek poets to camouflage all of their gaps, errors, and omissions. The politics, too, faltered, and the final chapters are more intent on wrapping the story up than finishing with any passion or point. Jemisin achieved something with this book, though it doesn't complete much of what it set out to do. I'll be embarrassed to admit to anyone in person that I read this because it really is a sexually explicit romance novel. Still, there was enough elsewhere in the book for me to be impressed.