The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Rating: 5/5, excellent

I loved this book. N.K. Jemisin creates a whole world for readers to explore. The way she obscures secrets to build tension and then reveals them at just the right dramatic moment is nothing short of masterful.

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the first book in her Broken Earth Trilogy. It’s set in a world ironically called the Stillness, where apocalyptic geological events occur every couple hundred years. In this world, there are magic-users called orogenes who can manipulate the earth, either stilling earthquakes or causing them.

Orogenes are both feared and oppressed for their powers by “stills” or people without orogeny. N.K. Jemisin is a black writer and uses the struggles of orogenes as a metaphor for the struggles of black people.

Jemisin flips the script on white supremacy by making the Sanzeds, a dark-skinned, kinky-haired, six-foot-tall race the Imperial oppressors and racial supremacists:

“Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they weren’t always so peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean.”

I thought this was a really fun difference and it was neat to see a book with a whole cast of black or mixed characters.

The book follows 3 women of different ages. One is a child just learning what orogeny is and coming to understand the world, one is a young adult whose view of what she knew before is changing, and one is an adult whose child was just killed by her husband and is trying to track him down and kill him.

(If dead children are a trigger for you, you might want to avoid this book… it happens a couple times)

One of the most profound aspects of this book is how being an oppressed minority means there’s a chance your children will be killed or destroyed by the society around them. The main characters show a lot of strength in the face of this cruelty and they have to bottle up their emotions to keep moving after the unthinkable happens.

Yeah! So, I’d really recommend it… the worldbuilding is excellent, the characters are well-fleshed out and feel like real people, the writing is really well-done and dramatic.

If there are any flaws, it’s that the plot takes a while to get going (after 30% of the book it picks up) and drags in places, but considering its many, many, high points, the low points didn’t really bother me that much.

For me, a 5 doesn’t mean a perfect book so much as a 4 that I’m really enthusiastic about and I think this one has a special spark that makes it not just another well-written novel.

I will definitely be continuing this series! There are two more books after this, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.