Title: The Fifth Season
Series: The Broken Earth #1
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic
Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child death, murder of children, blood, natural disasters, mild body horror, explicit sexual content, reluctant/coerced sex
Back Cover:
This is the way the world ends … for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.
Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
Review:
A man and a living statue tear open the ground and end the world. A geode cracks open and a child emerges. A mother comes home to find her toddler son beaten to death. And three different storylines converge into a single intense, dark, tangled, brilliant story.
It’s so hard to pick out any of the elements of this story and talk about them individually because everything in this book is interconnected. People, environment, tradition, those in power, those without, cities, rural villages, deadly natural disasters, all influence and are influenced by each other.
The worldbuilding is phenomenal. Society and people and everything are shaped by the fact of living on an inhospitible planet, where “Father Earth” periodically sends “seasons” of disasters in an attempt to wipe out all life. Time is counted in how many seasons a place has survived. And everyone hates and fears the people who have power to control the earth, to soothe it – or kindle its fury – at their whim.
There are three storylines in this book. Demaya is a child with this power to control earth, and when her family discovers it they despise her and are all too happy to give her away to the Fulcrum, where people like her are trained for the good of the Stillness. Seyenite has been trained, abused, and molded by the Fulcrum into a weapon, but a simple mission supervised by the strange and extraordinarily powerful Alabaster starts to unravel everything she thought she knew. And Essun lived a relatively happy life in a small village with her husband and two children, until her husband murders her son and kidnaps her daughter and she sets out to find them.
Unlike most books that have multiple storylines, I enjoyed every single one of these plots and sets of characters. This book did so many things right. From intense experiences being accurate without being overwhelming or feeling cheap on the page, to the complicated feelings of a child being told the person hurting her is doing it for her own good, to sex scenes that not only didn’t make me uncomfortable but that I actually enjoyed, this book is stunning.
Everything in this story is connected. Every. single. thing. The Fifth Season is not only following this varied cast of characters through their adventures, it’s peeling back layers of the society – to the characters and to the reader – and exposing the horrors within, and providing threads of mystery that it deftly weaves into a fascinating, astonishing tapestry. Even up to the very last word of the book (literally), threads are still being woven into the bigger picture. And though you technically could stop the journey here and not read the rest of the series, why would you want to?
The Broken Earth series:
- The Fifth Season
- The Obelisk Gate
- The Stone Sky
Bluejay Reads 