Title: The Stone Sky
Series: The Broken Earth #3
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, body horror (severe), gore, death of children, menstruation (mentions), heterosexual sex (mentions), natural disasters, excrement
Spoiler Warning: This book is the conclusion of a trilogy, so this review will inveitably contain spoilers of the first two books. Proceed at your own risk.
Back Cover:
This is the way the world ends… for the last time.
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.
Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.
For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.
Review:
The Stone Sky is an ending. The end of the series, the end of so many lives, in many ways the end of the world contained within these books. And it is very, very good.
This book again had the perspectives of Essun and Nassun, but also the third persepctive of Hoa. And this time around I actually did enjoy all three different perspectives – although I mainly liked Nassun’s perspective because she was seeing interesting things in the present world and Hoa’s because it was mostly from when he was young tens of thousands of years ago and gave context for what the world used to be like and what happened to make it so terrible. Of the main characters in the story, Essun is still the only one I really, truly care about.
That was the most interesting part of the book for me – learning about the past, the context, what society was like before the Seasons started, what and why the obelisks are, and how Father Earth came to see the life on its surface as an enemy. If The Fifth Season was about Essun and The Obelisk Gate was about feelings and internal journeys, The Stone Sky is about the past – how the world was broken, how Essun could put it back together to build a better future for her children, and how Nassun could tear it apart to end the hatred that fills the cracks and has shattered her young life over and over.
I knew that this is not the type of story or world where I would find a happy ending. There has been so much darkness and death and trauma in these books that a happy ending would feel cheap. But I did expect the ending to feel more satisfying than it did. Some of that may have to do with the fact that I liked Essun drastically more than Nassun and wasn’t super happy with how big of a role Nassun played in the climax. It was a reasonable ending, and probably as happy as it could have been considering what kind of story this is, but it left me feeling not completely satisfied.
I thoroughly enjoyed every book in this trilogy, and all of them are really, really fantastic books with good characters, an amazing world, a beautifully complex plot, and a ton of depth in multiple areas. But after being so completely blown away by The Fifth Season, the last two books seemed shorter, less layered, slightly anticlimactic by comparison. They’re still great and absolutely worth reading and I would recommend the whole trilogy without hesitation, but the first is by far the best of the three.
The Broken Earth series:
- The Fifth Season
- The Obelisk Gate
- The Stone Sky
Bluejay Reads 