Title: The Obelisk Gate
Series: The Broken Earth #2
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic
Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, child abuse, child emotional abuse and manipulation, blood, body horror, suicide (mention), death of parent, natural disasters
Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series and so this review contains spoilers of the first book, The Fifth Season. Also it will probably make very little sense without the context of what happened in book one.
Back Cover:
This is the way the world ends… for the last time.
The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, savior – has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.
It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.
It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.
The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
Review:
This is best read in quick succession with The Fifth Season, because that book ends in the middle of a conversation and this book picks up with the rest of it. So you jump right back into everything that was fantastic about The Fifth Season.
Excepting a few interludes with minor characters, this book only has two perspectives: Essun and Nassun. I fell right back into Essun’s story easily, picking up where I left off from book one. Even though it satisfied my curiosity to see what happened to Nassun and where she went after Jija took her away, I really struggled with her parts of the story.
I hated Nassun for loving the people who abused her in the same way I hate my younger self for loving the people who abused me: Knowing we couldn’t have survived any other way, knowing bonding is a natural response when the people we rely on hurt us, but still wishing we had been aware enough or brave enough or something enough to know that we didn’t deserve to be hurt and to say “No!” and escape and not be hurt any more. I hated her because I know what it’s like to be her and we were both children too young to know it was wrong for trusted adults to hurt us but somehow I still blame her and me for not being able to escape.
… This is the kind of book that brings up traumas. The traumas of Nassun’s story were more poignant for me than the ones of Essun’s story because I relate more to being an abused child than being a mother who has lost children, but this book is good at poking at all kinds of traumas of loss and abuse.
This book is very, very good. However, I do think it deserves the criticism lobbied at it that it’s not as good as the first book. In The Fifth Season, everything happens – it’s packed to bursting with action and new insights and learning about this world. The Obelisk Gate is markedly slower, and not just because it’s over 100 pages shorter. Much less happens. It’s more of an inner journey in this book. Nassun and Essun are dealing with their traumas as best they can while trying to make living where they are work and learning more about their orogeny and “magic,” which is orogeny and also not. (I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand it, but it was also really cool and I didn’t really care that I didn’t get the difference between the two.) It’s building up to do something really big in book three, but hardly anything happens in this book.
That said, even though I didn’t like The Obelisk Gate as much as I adored The Fifth Season, it was still an engrossing and fascinating read and I am absolutely going to read book three. (And the way everything is shaping up, I may have to revise what genre I think these books are. We’ll see.)
The Broken Earth series:
- The Fifth Season
- The Obelisk Gate
- The Stone Sky
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